Miller, Adrienne: The Coast of Akron

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Lowell Haven is a charismatic, egocentric artist famous for painting self portraits: Lowell as the Wife of Bath, Lowell as Martin Luther King Jr. and John the Baptist, Lowell as father, mother, and daughter in a family portrait. Despite his superficiality, Lowell is a commanding presence. He habitually collects fawning acolytes as temporary amusements, housing and lavishing attention on them until he discards them as tiresome. Unless they are indispensable. In this inner circle of the undiscardable are the three characters whose stories slowly unfold in Adrienne Miller's The Coast of Akron: Jenny, Lowell's estranged wife cum "muse," Jenny and Lowell's daughter Merit, and the needy, self-loathing, very wealthy Fergus, Jenny's one-time best friend turned Lowell's boyfriend and sponsor. As befits his character as empty vessel, Lowell himself has no voice in Miller's novel. The complex of relationships surrounding him is unraveled for us, rather, from the perspectives of Fergus, Merit, and Jenny, though Jenny tells her story only indirectly, in old diary entries read by her daughter. There is a great secret lurking behind the facade of On ne peut pas vivre seul, the mansion in Akron, Ohio in which Fergus has served as midwife to the Lowell pieces, the childhood home of Merit, for whom Fergus acted as the only responsible "parent." That secret reveals itself in time in Miller's novel, as do the smaller secrets, the particulars of the relationships that bind the author's tragic, flawed characters together, the levels of deception with which each of them lives.

The Coast of Akron is a slow read. It is, in fact, highly put-downable: you can read a thriller or three while you pause between Miller's chapters to rest. This may sound problematic, but it's not, really, because walking away from the book for good is unthinkable. The characters are so well drawn that they all but walk off the page and sit down with you. Miller's novel could surely be shortened by a lot, even halved, but its beauty is in being a long, unhurried, meandering account that bores slowly into the lives of its characters while building toward its denouement. My problem isn't with the book's pace, then, but I did emerge from the book dissatisfied with the conclusion, which is both frustratingly indecisive and, on its final page, weirdly abrupt. Dissecting that ending and the characters' various motivations throughout the book would make the stuff of some good, long conversations. This one's worth your time.