"Superb.… The collection is linked through characters that reappear (as relatives, friends, lovers) as the book progresses, showing the ways in which we are living in simultaneous dimensions of pain, betrayal and forgetting. Yet as bleak as their situations may get, there remains a thread of dark humor."
"Each new story swerves like a breathtaking drive through L.A., logical yet surprising.… Fight No More takes the connected story model to a pure and higher form, creating a satisfying web that expands one character, one ZIP code, one housing situation at a time, to 13 tales that are each distinct and whole but form something daring in their entirety."
"The tales’ intersections are as intricate as L.A.’s freeways—but, unlike the 405 at rush hour, totally delightful."
"[Millet is] one of the funniest writers of American fiction, a rival of George Saunders, Paul Beatty, Nell Zink, and Donald Antrim.… You have the sense that Millet could easily bury us in her smartness but has instead cleaved to the characters she’s created and made her humor generously broad. These are accessible fictions."
"[A] shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection."
"Millet’s great virtue is her negative capability. She inhabits the thoughts of the young and the elderly, of the fortunate and the bereaved, and of deviants and crackpots with equal candor and conversational ease."
04/23/2018
Millet’s irresistible latest (following Sweet Lamb of Heaven) is a series of loosely connected stories centering on Los Angeles real estate, eccentric musicians, and a dysfunctional family on the verge of implosion. In “To Think/I Killed a Cat,” readers are introduced to rebellious teen Jeremy, plotting to sabotage the sale of his family house. Readers also meet his father’s scandalously young and pregnant new flame, Lora, who features in “The Fall of Berlin” as a trophy wife coping with her new surroundings to the bemusement of her new relations. The cast gradually expands to include a haunted au pair named Lexie; her predatory stepfather, Pete; and, in the title story, suicidal musician Lordy and his bandmates Ry and Lynn. These characters float in and out of each other’s lives throughout the stories, which include a warped retelling of Snow White in “The Men,” and a realtor mistaking Lordy for a foreign dictator in “Libertines.” Millet’s emphasis is on the inner lives of her characters, as they ruminate on subjects like Hieronymus Bosch, Joseph Stalin, and vampires. The aggregate effect makes this collection a sprawling, tender portrait of modern adults quietly trapped by their youthful aspirations. (June)
01/01/2018
In her first book since the National Book Award long-listed Sweet Lamb of Heaven and her first collection since the Pulitzer Prize finalist Love in Infant Monkeys, Millet presents linked stories about our longing for home. At its center is a real estate broker whose splintered family manages to bridge gaps.
★ 2018-03-20
Real estate—and the anxiety and disruption that often come with moving house—drives this linked collection of Los Angeles-set tales.Millet has used broken relationships as a launchpad for austere, absurdist fiction (Magnificence, 2012; Sweet Lamb of Heaven, 2016) and laugh-out-loud farce (Mermaids in Paradise, 2014). Here, her attack is more compassionate and realistic, but she can still bring the weird: In one story, a woman believes her home is being overrun by "handyman midgets" who arrive unsolicited to make repairs; how much of this is real and how much is the panicked vision of a woman who's just been abandoned by her husband is intentionally vague. The central (and more grounded) figure in these stories is Nina, a real estate agent who must bear witness to the vicissitudes and cruelties of her clients: the famous musician who tries to drown himself in the pool of one home; the rebellious teen determined to force potential buyers to witness unmistakable evidence of his masturbatory habits; the wealthy, arrogant man who's led his mistress to believe she's his fiancee. Nina herself can't find a professional distance from these shenanigans, falling for a member of the musician's entourage in a relationship that ends tragically. Changing homes brings out our generosity and monstrousness in equal measure, Millet seems to suggest, an idea she explores most potently in a trio of stories featuring Lexie, a teenage sex worker whose safe job as an au pair is threatened by her sexually abusive stepfather. Those stories are especially strong because Millet so readily shifts point of view—by turns she can be a snotty rich kid, a pedophile, and a lower-class cam girl striving to rise above her station. And though Millet has never been much for easy uplift, the collection ends with the sense that our lives can find some kind of order if we acknowledge the forces that disrupt them.A linked-story collection done right, with sensitive and complex characters each looking for a place to call home.