Book Reviews by DAR

Adrienne Miller: "The Coast of Akron"

(First published in New York Magazine)

May I offer two theories for why THE COAST OF AKRON is so unrelentingly, almost bombastically, hip? First, imagine you’re the literary editor of a glossy with a grand literary tradition, but you’ve never written a book of your own. Month in and month out, you’re passing judgment on some of the world’s finest authors, you’re caustic and clever and all the things an editor is supposed to be, but you haven’t yet stepped up to the plate yourself. What must the pressure be like for someone like Adrienne Miller in the rounds of her day job as Esquire’s fiction editor?

Second: Is it possible that the insult of being reared outside New York, decades after the demise of the Algonquin Round Table, is so grievous that an Ohio-born writer must overcompensate by going on the offensive? That the stress of hailing from a place where “there was always more weather than traffic” takes such toll that one of its native authors must express not once, but every 150 pages, that New York “has much more of a ‘small-town mentality’” than Akron? Perhaps only someone who fears herself at heart—like one of the hyperkinetic characters in The Coast of Akron --a “dull, docile girl” from the Buckeye state could engage in such frantic writerly contortions to disprove it.

Which is a pity, because there is more than enough high humor and deadpan drollery for a satisfying romp in this tale of a “semi-semifamous” artist and “champion liar” whose entire life is an elaborate, narcissistic effort to disavow his Midwestern origins--most notably by pretending to be born in London, the offspring of Josephine Baker. In addition to lovely authorial touches (the cloudy Ohio sky resembles “coyote fur under glass,” antic observations (“strange, really, that phones look the same when they’re ringing and when they’re not”) and tasty apercus (a character walks “as if his sphincter were his most developed muscle”), Miller slings adverbs with all the natural-born insouciance of Eloise at the Ritz. So what if “uglily” and “jollily” look like typos? She uses them “chipperly.”

In her hands, comedy reaches a Franzen-like complexity, especially in the lengths various characters go to keep the unctuous Ohio-born Lowell Haven’s inflated sense of self intact so that he may keep producing his series of more than 500 painted self-portraits with self-consciously self-promoting titles such as “Lowell Crucified with Cow Crucified Next to Him” and “Lowell Naked in Room with Empty Containers of Proctor and Gamble Products.” You can almost hear the author sniggering to herself with mischief--especially when she goes on to raise the suspicion that Haven may not have actually created them in the first place.

So why doesn’t Miller settle down? She busies herself with so much surface brilliance – questions of mock profundity like “Do emus express their feelings? Do humans, or is everyone just pretending?” – that she forgets to ask real questions like: Should a novelist hide behind so many layers of self protection? Isn’t she supposed to be more concerned with saying something, than with just the saying? Aren’t characters supposed to be more than collections of kooky characteristics? What engines of pathos drive them? Overly aware of the formal dictates of hipness, Miller surmises that these are the questions it would be uncool to ask.

But good novel-writing is about risking uncoolness. It’s about exploring the jungly interiors of one’s characters, anatomizing their pistons of hurt. Beneath the bright cocktail patter of AKRON, there is not only the whiff of smugness that often accompanies the irreproachably hip, there is also a critical remoteness. Miller so strains to be sophisticated that she neglects to bring us in close. Nor is she aided in this by the blurbs her publisher has garnered, especially one from the King of Arch himself, Dave Eggers, who unhelpfully compares Miller to Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy and, of all left-fielders, M.F.K. Fisher. (Careful there, Dave – your seal of approval is getting so ubiquitous it’s in danger of becoming the Betty Crocker of +belles lettres.+) With friends like these, how’s she ever going to get real?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all this overheated ha-ha does +not+ devolve from the double whammy of being a rookie novelist from the Tire Capital of America. But to the extent that it does, Miller can relax. She’s not in Akron any more. She’s a New York writer with a New York book under her belt. Her next one – the assured one – could just take the cake.