An imaginative if sometimes rambling collection of short stories.
Miller shares offbeat tales set in Southern California in this collection of literary short fiction.
“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” A creative writing teacher chalks this phrase onto a blackboard in the title story from Miller’s new collection, right underneath the eccentric spelling of “fiction.” The teacher—who has crossed eyes, braces, and a garbled voice—is himself slightly eccentric, as is the story and the 12 others that follow: An unusually tall high schooler attempts to ask a girl to prom while preparing for a presentation on the moons of Jupiter; in a neighborhood full of rumors of death and divorce, a father and his son learn the long, strange tale of their Vietnamese neighbor; an aspiring writer-turned-teacher experiences heart palpitations while preparing a lecture on California’s Channel Islands; an Uber driver gives a 98-year-old man a ride to the airport, where he is asked to go above and beyond the normal expectations of the job; and a motorist realizes he has the power to hear other drivers’ thoughts by staring at them via their side mirrors. Miller’s stories are, at their best, infused with wry humor, as in “The Time I Met Weaver McCracken,” in which the narrator—another of Miller’s numerous aspiring writers—travels to a conference to meet his idol: “I was going over ninety miles an hour, so I eased off the gas and turned on the cruise control. You have to take chances in life, but you have to be smart about them. Like Weaver McCracken, leaving his job as a golf journalist to write golf fiction.” The chatty narration sometimes hides a lack of plot, however, and many of the stories tend to run on without much of a sense of purpose or urgency. (The more successful pieces, like “Manfred Rutherford Junior’s Last Dance,” about the elderly Uber customer, tend to be shorter and less digressive, arranging themselves around a clearer premise or relationship.) Even so, readers will find a wealth of truthful lies to ponder here.
An imaginative if sometimes rambling collection of short stories.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9798986335872
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Gnatcatcher Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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