Customer Reviews

The Coast of Akron: A Novel

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

This is a hilarious and highly imaginative novel. It's a sharp page-turner with rich descriptions and original characters.

First there's Merit. She's a young woman living in the Midwest with her statistician husband and teenage stepdaughter - and lots of pets. Merit works in an office and her descriptions of the mind-numbing office work are great and sadly reminded me of my own - particularly the scene of the going away luncheon for a coworker at a strip mall Chinese restaurant. It all felt a little too real for me. Merit's little world seems happy and quiet, until you learn more about her family - it's falling apart. Mainly the problem is her parents - Jenny and Lowell. Jenny is going off the deep end because her now ex-Lowell continues to torture her through his new relationship with Fergus - Jenny's ex-best friend. Merit herself isn't doing so great either and soon finds herself falling for her airhead assistant Randy - who has some of the books better lines. Randy is one of those guys in the office who's essentially a loser, but still cool and somehow hot.....

Jenny begins the book a struggling and talented teenage artist who hopes to become famous for her work. She's very idealistic but soon finds herself falling in love with Lowell, the charming man who will ultimately take her talent and hopes and dreams away from her and claim them as his own. Jenny becomes addicted to Lowell, and she begins to paint him over and over again - he's her favorite subject and soon her only subject. It's a twisted kind of love. Their beautiful and dark love story drives much of the book's action. But Lowell, as much as he does seem to care for Jenny, just sucks her dry. As they get older, Lowell becomes a famous artist, Jenny a drunken disaster.

Fergus is an insane creation. He owns a huge faux Tudor mansion in the Midwest, and he's filled it with all of "Lowell's" artwork. These crazy paintings of Lowell are in every room and are always staring at them. Fergus narrates a good bit of the book and it's his voice that's the source of so much of the book's humor. Fergus is desperate for attention and sadly seems so alone. With lots of money and no job, he becomes obsessed with frivolity and spends most of his days ordering things out of catalogs that he doesn't need and will never use. He also writes fake celebrity magazine profiles in his journal - about himself! Fergus begins the book as Jenny's best friend, but he becomes completely obsessed with her and she can't take it and rejects him. Since Fergus can't have Jenny, he wants the next best thing - Jenny's husband Lowell. And since Lowell is so focused on himself (and all the affairs he's having) it's not enough, so Fergus goes after Merit. Fergus becomes a kind of step parent for her, as Lowell and Jenny often leave her alone with Fergus while they paint in their very private art studio. Fergus plays with Merit when she's young and even dresses her like himself sometimes. Meanwhile it seems everyone rejects poor Fergus...Merit eventually does too.

The pages fly by. The book is chocked full of both big ideas - art, gender, pop culture, the nature of celebrity, etc. - and great one liners. You could dip into any page and find beautiful writing. In the end, Fergus appears to go off the deep end, throws a huge costume party where everything boils to a head....and Fergus plans his Sunset Boulevard type finale...and then there's maybe a fiery ending...but I don't want to give it all away. This is one to read, relish and recommend. I'll look forward to the author's next novel.

I ordered this after a few friends had recommended and was really impressed. All in all, totally loved it. I really got sucked in to these characters lives. Nabokov is one of one of my favorite writers and something about the prose and characters here really reminded me of some of his books. It's a pretty funny and playful read.

The Coast of Akron is NOT chick lit (which I was expecting), and all the more kudos to Miller for that. It's a confident book, loud and sometimes actually pretty cocky. I believe it's groundbreaking in its kinetic energy, outrageous humour, and very unusual use of voice - which seem to me like the self-interrogating inner monologues that we all hear in our heads. I understand some of the other reviewers who object to the ambiguous ending, but I felt that everything in the ending was foreshadowed, and organic to the action, if you really study it and the chapters that came before. In the end, I was delighted by so many sentences, chuckled often, so often, in fact, that I earmarked a lot of pages. I laughed a lot, but was also disturbed and provoked, and I'm still thinking about the characters. "CoA" really stuck with me. What more can you ask from a novel?

I decided to pick this one up after I'd read some good reviews and am really glad I did. I was cracking up the whole time I was reading The Coast of Akron. It's a totally funny book. It has so much energy and life to it that some of the other novels I've read recently seem kinda dead in comparison. Merit is one of the best female characters I've encountered in a long time, and although I was upset by her seedy, and very intimately described affair with the loser Randy (the tooting subordinate in the Iron Maiden tee-shirt!), and although she definitely does bad things and has a "dark side," (sorry, I saw Star Wars this weekend!) I think she's an incredibly sharply realized character, conflicted, complicated, and totally real and believable. And where do I even start with the Auntie Mame character Fergus? A true social misfit with flaming red hair, a human train wreck who sleeps in a tent because of his asthma, his observations -- sometimes deluded, sometimes heartbreakingly sane -- are caustic and hilarious. I can still hear his voice in my head right now. And Merit's parents, her father the "semifamous" Warholian artist Lowell, and her mother, Jenny, the true artistic genius, are characters you won't soon forget. And I didn't even mention the London punks Grunt and Scrumpie! Even the minor characters are expansive, flawed, and unforgettable. You get so close to them you feel like you're breathing their air. It's a book about the lies we tell, both about ourselves and about the people we love, so we can keep on surviving.

On another level, I thought it was about what is considered "art" in 2005, and how a carefully calculated mythology may matter more than real artistic talent does. The author works as an editor, so maybe she's making a veiled comment about how the literary world works, too. I went to grad school in journalism -- hated it! -- and I think it's also pretty funny to see the author's take on journalists, as expressed through the shady magazine writer Bradley W. Dormer. (does Merit get him at the end, too??) It's also interesting because the women in the book are the characters who have the real power, and they're the ones who are pulling the puppet strings...and the puppets are the men? The book really takes risks and has its own unique style. I'll be eager to see what the author does next. I loved really getting into the text and trying to decode it -- what's the truth about Lowell's mother? How much does Merit's husband know? Is the ending a dream/hallucination, and does Fergus just go insane? I'm suggesting this one to all my friends because I want to talk about it with someone!

Why is Merit Haven Ash feeling so out of sorts? She's got a good job, a willing assistant, an upstanding husband, and a party to attend.

So what's the problem?

Just that her job selling ad-space to a magazine bores her; her willing assistant is altogether incompetent...and appealing; her husband - with his chronically-crooked glasses - is a tad bit on the uptight side; and the party? Well, that's the worst part of all. That's the part where she'll be thrown into a room with her mother, her father, her "Uncle" Fergus, and a gigantic family lie.

Adrienne Miller's THE COAST OF AKRON is the story of Merit Haven Ash and her parents, Lowell Haven and Jenny Meatyard. Lowell Haven is a famous artist, best-known for his haunting and outrageous self-portraits. Jenny is an artist, too, best-known for...well, not known, really. And then there's "Uncle" Fergus who fancies himself Merit's mother and best friend. When Fergus's omnipresence and Lowell's philandering drive Jenny and Merit right out of the house and out of their lives nearly everyone is scarred. Lowell suddenly quits painting. Jenny dives into a bottle and rarely comes out. Merit flounders at work and at home. And Fergus clings to reality only by a fingernail and a penchant for dramatic flair.

So what's to happen when Fergus is charged with planning a party for one of Lowell's "friends?" Only the outrageous, of course.

THE COAST OF AKRON is a wry tale with characters so strange they almost have to be real. Their quirks, desires and actions give Miller's story a delicious can't-stay-away quality that has the reader glued to the very page for wonder of what ludicrous action is next on the list of Merit, Jenny, Lowell, and Fergus.

With plenty of action and lots of emotion, Miller carries the story along nicely - the only dull moments being a couple of lengthy passages of poor writing on Fergus's part. Make no mistake, however. Adrienne Miller herself is no poor writer. Dispersed throughout the book are emotional gems such as this:

"Then he whispered into my ear, `I love you so much that I'm afraid, my dear, I'm just going to have to call you `Me'!'" (p. 161)

Miller's humor is very understated and someone who needs jokes to smack them upside the head will likely be dumbfounded by THE COAST OF AKRON. Sardonic situations and wordplay are the name of the game here, with the irony of her characters' situations lending themselves to wry humor that is not so much laugh-out-loud funny as they are completely amusing.

Adrienne Miller's THE COAST OF AKRON is a gently funny read that will particularly appeal to a younger generation (perhaps the college-to- thirty-somethings crowd). While it is not a light or quick read, the time spent carousing with the words on the page feels like it flies. It is, indeed, time well spent.

I just finished reading The Coast of Akron, and I'm stunned and amazed. Nothing I've read about it so far had prepared me to be knocked sideways like this. Honestly, I was a little skeptical about this book because of all the hype surrounding it, and also because Miller is the fiction editor at Esquire (a cool job, but not my favorite magazine), but you must read it to believe it. I loved Fergus, I loved Merit, I loved Wyatt, I loved Jenny, I even loved the Gatsby-like villain Lowell. But it's not only a character-driven book, it's also a book of Big Ideas -- about identity and the nature of celebrity. I'm still speechless about the ending. I had a kind of a romance with this stellar and devastating novel, and so will you if you care about good fiction. It is our era's The Great Gatsby, and it will be taught years from now.

This might be the worst book I have ever read. Characters without context, story line without substance, and just oh-so-shallow situations. Blech! Who the heck are these people and why should I care what happens to them?

Do yourself a favor and skip this one. And whatever you do, do NOT read the audiobook. I only read audiobooks because reading for me is background atmosphere to most of my activities, so I think I will just write my own audiobook and self-record it. Guaranteed it would be better than this.

If you must read it, just start and stop at random throughout - there is no chronology and the narrative is so shallow and trivial it doesn't matter where you enter or exit.

Big disappointment. The idea had such promise, and I was looking forward to the irony and humor. But this writer makes even rust-belt Akron seem like L.A.

I approached this book with high hopes, having remembered a New York Times review that praised it as "hilarious." It's not. It's not even mildly amusing. It's clumsy, unfunny, and full of characters that remain opaque and unclever throughout -- although I get the feeling that we, the readers, are supposed to find it all too too amusing. Whomever reviewed the book must have been a relative! My advice is, skip it.