The Coast of Akron
Adrienne Miller Hutchinson, 390pp, £12.99
ISBN 0091800404
Adrienne Miller's first novel begins with Wyatt and Merit Ash, a married couple who live in Akron, Ohio. Wyatt is a statistician (personal motto: "In God We Trust. All Others Must Use Data") whose attempts to impose order upon his house and family are thwarted by his wife's menagerie of pets and chaotic attitude to life in general. But after this portrait of a marriage, the novel sprawls into something messier and more ambitious. Merit's father, the artist Lowell Haven, has mysteriously stopped painting five years earlier. He is now famous only for the parties he throws in an enormous house called On Ne Peut Pas Vivre Seul, which belongs to his lover, Fergus, who was once the best friend of Lowell's estranged wife, Jenny, who is Merit's mother. Jenny, once an art student herself, has not spoken to Lowell in the past five years.
Such an elaborate scenario should guarantee a labyrinthine
plot, but the novel's only secret - the predictable revelation that
Jenny is the true creator of Lowell's paintings - simply isn't interesting enough to sustain the reader over 300 more pages.
To make up for its lack of suspense, The Coast of Akron takes refuge in variety of form: a third-person account of Merit's struggle with boredom is interwoven with Jenny's diaries of London in the 1970s and Fergus's bitter monologue on his party preparations.
The novel maintains an uneasy tension between realism and satire. Larger-than-life characters have names such as Jenny Meatyard and Preston Lympany: the art-world satire is heavy-handed but amusing all the same. Lowell's Cindy Sherman-style work includes self-portraits entitled Boy Scout or: Murderer? and Lowell Crucified with Cow Crucified Next to Him. Fergus, however, is a grotesque too far. He is amusing, at first, as he free-associates his way around the 65 rooms of his fake Tudor mansion while sipping from a Kahlua-filled Thermos: "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 overmoisturised leg, and I think, and even say aloud (to myself), God, Michael Douglas really does look like an old woman these days." But his monomania makes him an exhausting narrator: it's like being trapped in a lift with a poor Quentin Crisp imitator who just won't stop quipping.
The novel's most successful strand is the most conventional: Merit's dissatisfaction with her job (selling ads for a local magazine) and with her "unbelievably nice and dorky" husband, her drift into "marital slippage" with her dyslexic stoner assistant, and her relationship with her more colourful parents. It is all the more disappointing that Merit's story stops so abruptly: by the end of the novel we don't know if the affair has ended, if Wyatt suspects it ever started, or how her parents will react to what she tells a journalist at one of Lowell's parties.
Miller has a particular gift for description. Jenny, with her painter's eye, comes up with the novel's most memorable images - on the difference between the sky in London and Ohio, "the gray more delicate, softer: coyote fur under glass".
Occasionally, however, you wish Miller would just let the insignificant detail go: do we really need to know the names of all of Fergus and Lowell's emus when the novel ends with us not knowing what will become of any of the characters? If only Miller had listened to her most deluded character. Fergus confides in a rare moment of clarity: "You know how the movie or the book always ends at the party, before the next day's clean-up scene? That's not very realistic, now is it?"
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
