The Coast of Akron

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 rejec

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!

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.

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.