Fight No More

by Lydia Millet

Overview

Twelve interlocking stories set in Los Angeles describe a broken family through the homes they inhabit.

In her first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys, which became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lydia Millet explores what it means to be home. Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting fractured communities and families. She moves through the houses of L.A.’s wealthy elite and finds men and women both crass and tender, vicious and desperate. With wit and intellect, Millet offers profound insight into human behavior from the ordinary to the bizarre: strong-minded girls are beset by the helpless, myopic executives are tormented by their employees, and beastly men do beastly things.

Fresh off the critical triumph of Sweet Lamb of Heaven (longlisted for the National Book Award), Millet is pioneering a new kind of satire—compassionate toward its victims and hilariously brutal in its depiction of modern American life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635485
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lydia Millet has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

"Home" is a word that can conjure feelings of safety and belonging. The very sound suggests a comfortable embrace; the exhale is almost a sigh of relief. But the canny and daring writer Lydia Millet is no sentimentalist, and in Fight No More, her new collection of linked stories, she explores the fragility and treachery of a place that can offer both solace and deception. Millet's boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns. The ambitions of her latest are no less far-reaching…Life cannot be fully reckoned with, Millet suggests in this shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection, unless we embrace the fact that there is always a snake in even the most serene of gardens.

The New York Times Book Review - Marisa Silver

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)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection."

Marisa Silver - New York Times Book Review

"[Fight No More] is a novel about death disguised as a story collection about real estate, and it's alternately wrenching and hilarious, peaceful and joyful, so tender you almost can't bear it and so brutal you know that you can't."

NPR

"As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love. … [C]onfirms the evolution of this stellar author’s vital, caring, and audacious creativity and literary splendor."

Booklist (starred review)

"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."

Wall Street Journal

"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."

|Los Angeles Times

"Hilarious and fantastical…. [T]he most original short story collection I’ve read in years."

Michael Silverblatt - Bookworm on KCRW

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.

Los Angeles Times

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.

Wall Street Journal

Hilarious and fantastical…. [T]he most original short story collection I’ve read in years.

Michael Silverblatt - Bookworm

As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love. … [C]onfirms the evolution of this stellar author’s vital, caring, and audacious creativity and literary splendor.

Booklist (starred)

The tales’ intersections are as intricate as L.A.’s freeways—but, unlike the 405 at rush hour, totally delightful.

O Magazine

[Millet is] one of the funniest writers of American fiction ... She’s ferociously untame — free with the use of non-realist devices like time travel or mermaids — but also not immune to the pleasing strokes of the 19th-century novel, like romances across class lines or sudden inheritances. She takes on big political themes like environmental despoliation, structural inequality, and the bomb. Critics have noticed this all along, and if Millet isn’t as famous as she deserves to be, it’s only a matter of time. … 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.

Christian Lorentzen - New York Magazine

★ 03/01/2018
Showing a high-end California house to a man she assumes to be an African dictator, brisk, self-contained real estate agent Nina is shaken when the man plunges into the pool and must be revived by paramedics. She learns that he's actually a musician, with his presumed bodyguards his band members, and in the course of this wise and witty new collection—Millet's first since the Pulitzer Prize finalist Love in Infant Monkeys—she connects with one of the musicians, though her love is slammed by tragedy. Connection is the key throughout, as these stories interlock like the veins in a leaf. For instance, we keep meeting troubled teen Jem, who slyly disrupts Nina's showing of his divorced mother's house and gets abused teen Lexie, whom he's met via cybersex, a babysitting job with his father and stepmother. Jem grows over these pages, genuinely helping Lexie and his sharp-witted if ailing gram, no slouch herself. Meanwhile, Nina contends with a client who thinks she has dwarves in the attic. VERDICT Top-notch, in-your-face work from the priceless Millet. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]

Library Journal

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews

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