THE COAST OF AKRON
By Adrienne Miller
Farrar Straus Giroux. 390 pp. $25
Let's get this part out of the way: Adrienne Miller is 33, she's pretty, and she's the literary editor of Esquire, meaning she's well-connected. For all of these reasons, her debut novel is being greeted with both extra attention and extra suspicion. It's the attention that's warranted -- The Coast of Akron is an imperfect book, but Miller's enormous talent is evident on every page.
Set in present-day Akron, Ohio, the novel shifts back and forth in focus and viewpoint. Among the three central characters is Merit, a well-meaning but neurotic twentysomething who's making a mess of her marriage to an older husband -- a guy who, depending upon your perspective, is either sweetly dorky or insufferably uptight. While Merit sneaks around with a pothead co-worker, she's also jeopardizing her relationship with a teenage stepdaughter she adores.
Yet whether Merit can be held accountable is unclear. She was the product of a dazzlingly dysfunctional union, described in diary entries from the 1970s and '80s by her mother, Jenny. Now fragile and disappointed, Jenny once burned with artistic ambition. Yet it was her supremely narcissistic ex-husband, Lowell, who became a famous painter. And the main narrator is Lowell's boyfriend (yes, boyfriend), Fergus. Fergus has, among other things, horrible allergies, strange red hair and way too much time and money on his hands. Explaining his schedule, he says, "I also enjoy flipping through terrible magazines (why is it the terribler the magazine, the more vaguely excremental its smell?), the ink leaving a ghostly backward impression on my overmoisturized leg, and I think, and even say aloud sometimes (to myself), God, Michael Douglas really does look like an old woman these days."
Most of Miller's characters are deeply weird, and she describes their weirdness in such painstaking detail that it becomes not just recognizable but endearing. Merit, for instance, "loved [her pet] pig so much that she wanted to grunt whenever she saw her." Miller is terrific at capturing awkward or poignant moments, at showing just how bizarre life is for some: "Why was it no matter where you were, no matter what the situation -- even if it was your own party (which this wasn't) -- the crowd always felt hostile?"
But Miller's strengths as a writer are also her weaknesses: Just as her humor can be sharp, it can be self-consciously clever. I loved her characters' quirks, except when the quirks became so ludicrous as to strain credulity; I cared about the characters enough not to want her to satirize them. And the extensive level of detail shows up even when what's happening is unimportant. Miller devotes so many pages to describing the past that the back-story outweighs the present action, killing narrative momentum and tension. It doesn't help that the book's "secret" is revealed early on, and that what there is of a plot feels contrived: Fergus is planning an elaborate party where he hopes everyone will set aside the acrimony.
Ultimately, Miller proves better at getting her characters into than out of sticky situations, and I was dissatisfied with the unresolved, farfetched ending. But it feels ungrateful to complain too much. Throughout the book, Miller offers readers many gifts, making trenchant observations about everything from gender to the art world to the English. Like Miller, I'm an Ohio native, and God bless her for setting her drama and intrigue in an area many people consider neither dramatic nor intriguing. As one character puts it, "Unexpected things can, and do, happen, in Akron, Ohio."
In an interesting twist, art and life comment on each other through Jenny, who gave up her professional goals for a man and lives a defeated life. "Jenny once created things, too, but then, like most women, stopped," Fergus explains. "She never had any respect for her own talent." It is the ambition of The Coast of Akron that provides a kind of meta-antidote to Jenny's depressing trajectory. Miller herself has written a big book, a novel that's smart and confident and juicy, and in doing so, she has pulled off an impressive artistic feat. ·
Curtis Sittenfeld's first novel, "Prep," was published in January.
