Millington, Mil: A Certain Chemistry

Villard © 2003, 404 pages [amazon]


Twenty-eight-year-old Tom Cartwright is a prolific if not a renowned writer, the author of numerous ghostwritten biographies as well as a host of pseudonymously published magazine articles on such subjects as "how I coped with the menopause." Tom has much to be thankful for. He can crank out a passable manuscript faster than most and he's a top-notch speller. He's also involved with something like the perfect woman, Sara, his girlfriend of five years, who is beautiful and plucky and much given to witty banter. Things look even better for Tom when he is hired to ghostwrite the biography of the hugely popular soap star Georgina Nye--the owner of what is reportedly the U.K.'s finest  pair of buttocks--a gig which will earn Tom a six-figure commission but buy him a world of trouble: Georgina turns out to be as attracted to Tom as he is to her. Can our hero, as he supposes ("Christ--it was hard to see a way in which this couldn't work"), keep his relationship with Sara in working order while trysting with a callipygian soap star and dodging the paparazzi?

There is also God, who is evidently shorter than one would suppose and who interrupts Tom's first-person narrative from time to time to expound upon His point that romance is illusory and love the stuff of chemical impulses.Tom is guided through life and publishing by his agent-cum-mother figure Amy, a hard-drinking piranha of a woman, and by his amusingly death-obsessed editor Hugh. There is also God, who is evidently shorter than one would suppose and who interrupts Tom's first-person narrative from time to time to expound upon His point that romance is illusory and love the stuff of chemical impulses. Tom himself is an awkward, smart character who tends to find himself in absurdly funny circumstances--hiding beneath his dining room table from a pair of pre-tween girls with only an overheated laptop to cover his nakedness, hightailing it across town in desperate need of half a haircut, or merely navigating the difficult waters of getting to an appointment at precisely the right time:

"What I generally do--and I think this is the only thing you can do if you're an adult who's taken some time to consider all the issues and come up with a clearheaded course of action--is I arrive early, and then hide. I find somewhere close by and conceal myself: wait until I see the person arrive, pause for fifteen seconds, then march in--apologizing profusely for being late. Works every time. Well, except for those times when the person you're meeting happens to walk up behind you while you're crouching watchfully behind a low wall across from the meeting place; if that happens, you're pretty much into 'faking a seizure' territory, really."

Like his first novel, Things my Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, Mil Millington's A Certain Chemistry is a smart romp of a book. His detailing of life's small moments, rife as they are with the potential for embarrassment, will leave readers laughing aloud.

Tags: A Certain Chemistry, book reviews, books, Mil Millington, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About