The Coast of Akron [Paperback]

I love this novel. We chose it for our book club pick for next week, and I just finished reading and was simply blown away. The characters are some of the freshest and most real I've seen in a novel in years. I can't get them out of my mind. I'm not sure I've ever read a book by a woman that is this kind of literary novel. Most women's fiction these days is either overly precious, schmaltzy or calculated, or written as if our inner lives are only about finding a man. This book tackles so much more. From the suppression of women as artists to following your passion to, to what's it like to live in the Midwest and dream of something more, to the nature of celebrity (the faux magazine profiles Fergus writes about himself are so funny...don't we all think about how we'd picture ourselves in a celebrity profile? I've never really seen this in a novel before.).

I won't give away the ending, but some of the scenes there are crazy. Funny, dramatic, and disturbing. Finally a literary novel that builds to an amazing finish. There's a lot to talk about with this one.

There is a lot to like in Miller's Coast of Akron: her sense of humor, vivid and original descriptions, sharp use of language, a boatload of absurdity. Unfortunately, these appear more as isolated bits and pieces while the larger whole-book aspects that one tends to judge a novel on--story, character, and narrative--are much less effective. Akron, therefore, is a book that while you could open it randomly and point to almost any sentence or paragraph as proof of the writer's obvious talent, you just don't want to read.

It focuses on a single family made up of ludicrous characters: Lowell Haven--famed self-portrait artist of personality (think a more self-aware, more fraudulent Andy Warhol) who hasn't "painted" in five years; his ex-wife Jenny--failed artist now involved with a children's art museum whose younger life is conveyed via her diary notes; Fergus--Jenny's flamboyantly gay childhood friend now rich and living (with Lowell) in a status-dripping Tudor mansion in Akron complete with suits of armor and a motto; Merit--Jenny and Lowell's daughter who escapes her marriage with an obsessive-compulsive statistician with periodic wildly inappropriate affairs (including her current one with an Iron-Maiden tee-shirt wearing employee of hers), and Wyatt--Merit's husband who is more attuned to his self-invented lighting system than to his marriage.

The characters are over-the-edge and Miller uses their inevitable fall into dissolution to poke fun at lots of personal and societal issues. There's a lot here on art, on gender, on identity, status, artificiality, celebrity, pop culture, etc. And it all works for about the first quarter or third of the book. But then the reader begins to grow a bit wearied of the episodic nature; of the over-the-top nature of the characters; of the sprawling, somewhat disconnected plot. Like the family, the novel starts to fall apart (though unlike the family it at least had a promising start).

One continues to be impressed by the building blocks of the book--Miller's sentences, her language, her imagery (dolls with faces removed, etc.) but the blocks never seem to actually construct anything. Because the characters are so over-the-top, because they're so removed from reality and so unlikable in many ways, they can't save the plot because one doesn't care much about what happens to them. Fergus comes closest to gaining our empathy, but never quite does, while at the other side of the spectrum is Lowell, who is truly unlikable but also such a vague, unsubstantial presence that we don't get the joy of truly hating him, or feeling much at all. Luckily, this inability to connect with the characters makes the ending even less of a disappointment than it is.

I'd certainly try Miller's next novel because Akron shows not just great potential but great current ability, but I'd recommend passing on Coast of Akron and hoping that ability is put to better use in novel number two.

THE COAST OF AKRON, the debut novel by Esquire literary editor Adrienne Miller, is the story of the Haven family of Akron, Ohio. Jenny Meatyard meets Lowell Haven in London in 1976 and falls in love with him almost immediately. Both painters by profession, the two young adults unify themselves against the world--shutting out everyone from Jenny's best friend, Fergus, to their daughter, Merit. But it is Fergus who, upon their return to America, offers Jenny and Lowell--"Jewell," he calls them--and their young daughter a home, in his sprawling Akron mansion, an estate named On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul (French for 'One Cannot Live Alone'). It is not long before Fergus offers Lowell more than just his home and, upon learning of her husband's affair with her best friend, Jenny takes Merit and moves out in disgust. But there is still something between Lowell and Jenny: not love, necessarily, but a shocking secret that, if uncovered, would ruin Lowell, the man who has made himself famous--and very rich to boot--with multitudes of Warholian "self-portraits."

Years later, Merit is an adult, practically estranged from her family. She has married a good, if anal-retentive, man named Wyatt, and has accepted his 13-year-old daughter Caroline as her own. But there's one problem: She just can't seem to be faithful to her husband, and has "slipped" three times in the course of her seven-year marriage. Lowell and Fergus are together only in the sense that they share a home, and Lowell, an aging wanna-be aristocrat, flaunts relationships with both men and women under pitiable Fergus's nose. Lowell mysteriously stopped painting five years ago--the world wonders why--and has virtually no contact with his ex-wife, who is now a destroyed middle-aged woman, eaten up by her secret. But everything is coming to a head; years of lies are about to be unraveled, and THE COAST OF AKRON takes readers on a journey to truth culminating in a bizarre costume party at On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul.

Miller's deft ability to create complicated characters is apparent in her debut novel. She plays with perspective, weaving a series of lies and deceptions into three different narrative voices. The style of the novel is unquestionabley unique; I found myself constantly having to try and "decode" the narrative to find out what the real truth was. Miller is clearly a remarkable writer; her novel is sprawling, confident, satiric, intelligent, incredibly humorous, and unique. She tackles big themes in THE COAST OF AKRON: familial dysfunction, betrayal and deception, beauty, what it means to be an "artist" in today's culture, what it means to be a "celebrity" in today's culture. Miller, herself a journalist, also seems to be making some interesting comments about that particular profession. It's a risky--and pretty successful--first offering.

But the ending left much to be desired--at least for me personally. I'm all for open endings, but the end of THE COAST OF AKRON was too abrupt; it just left me too confused, with too many questions. Not one issue is resolved by the end of the book--not one. However, although this bothered me quite a bit...it still made sense. In a family as dysfunctional as the Havens', it's easy to see how the conflicts are still raging, and a nice "let's-wrap-it-up" ending would seem inauthentic in such a family. Perhaps the confusion readers are bound to feel at the end of the novel is meant to mirror the confusion felt by the Haven family concerning their present situation? I don't know. I'm puzzled.

But despite my confusion over the ending of the novel, I liked THE COAST OF AKRON. Being from Ohio myself, it was neat to see references to things that are familiar to me in the text, from Interstate 271 to the Cleveland Indians to Cedar Point. It's a solid novel overall--a solid story, solidly written, with deftly-developed sympathetic characters and a refreshingly peculiar narrative voice. And it's intelligently comedic. I'll look forward to reading Miller's next novel.