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Book Review: The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller

The Coast of AkronThis book reverberates with a jumble of voices. It begins with an omniscient narrator describing the life of a loopy young woman named Merit Haven Ash. Then Merit’s father’s lover chimes in with a rather high-pitched account of his own equally eccentric existence, and, when Merit begins reading her mother’s old diaries, we are introduced to another first-person perspective.

Initially, I found this to be a bit much. I felt that such cacophony could only be the product of a first-time novelist’s lack of craft and discipline. I was, however, still trying to decide whether my objection was criticism or mere complaint when Fergus—the aforementioned lover—started writing an imaginary profile of himself in the hypothetical style of a magazine journalist, at which point I thought, “Well, fuck it,” and decided to just chill.

This novel is quite mad, and unlike anything I have ever read. My own sense of discombobulation was no doubt fueled, if only in part, by the novel’s locale. While the frisson of recognition my be unexceptional for people who live in, say, New York, I’ve never encountered a fictional version of my hometown before. Miller—who is also from Akron—offers a portrait of the Rubber Capital of the World that is both real and imagined, and it was oddly thrilling and subtly unnerving for me to enter her universe.

But you don’t have to be from northeastern Ohio to find The Coast of Akron oddly thrilling and subtly unnerving. This story’s weird power is fueled, I think, by its internal tensions. This story is comic and tragic, but not tragicomic—both the funny bits and the pathos are real and distinct and not at all ironic. It’s both screwball and bitchy, campy and Gothic, excessive and honest, but—again—these elements do not mitigate each other. For example, Fergus may be a diminutive, egregiously faggoty hypochondriac, but that doesn’t mean that he’s any less the lethal emotional vampire, nor does his destructive monstrosity make his own emptiness any less sad.

Although it’s quite playful and often very funny, this is a profoundly anxious novel. Each narrator, each character, offers a significantly different interpretation of events, and the result is disturbing. By the end, this disharmonious chorus of voices creates an uncanny sense that nothing—even, or especially, our own memories—is at it seems, and that nothing—even our own selves—is real.

The Coast of Akron is ridiculous and terrible, and Miller’s writing is a rare, strange, powerful alchemy.

August 8, 2005 | Permalink

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