Eccentrics, artistes have their day in clever 'Akron'
The Coast of Akron
By Adrienne Miller
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 390 pp., $25
It's almost impossible to read ''The Coast of Akron," Adrienne Miller's alternately seductive and exasperating new novel, without thinking back to ''The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," by Michael Chabon.
Both are accomplished comic debuts set in Rust Belt cities not often found in literary fiction, and both concern themselves with arty bisexuals and airy eccentrics who have funny names. Even the ironic titles are similar (Akron, for the uninitiated, has no coast). Chabon's book launched an important talent, and Miller's may well do the same. Hers is at the very least the more ambitious of the two novels, if not necessarily the more satisfying.
''The Coast of Akron" is in large part about the Havens: charlatan artiste Lowell; his supremely talented but insanely self-effacing wife, Jenny; their restless grown daughter, Merit; and the family's flamboyant patron, Fergus Goodwyn, in whose sprawling and kitschy mansion they all live for a while. We get to spend time in the consciousness of each of these characters except Lowell, who is the self-involved black hole at the center of everything. A renowned painter whose works have only a single subject (himself), Lowell is a dissolute cross between Cindy Sherman and Odd Nerdrum, appearing on canvas after canvas in a variety of ridiculous guises and getups and finding favor in the art world despite (or even because of) his Akronian reclusiveness. ''He was a machine," Jenny writes after their first encounter, ''humming along on the engine of his self-regard."
But the basis of his fame and fortune is dishonest, as we soon learn from (among other sources) Jenny's diary, which Merit has discovered and which we read along with her between chapters on Merit's hilarious sexual and professional misadventures and Fergus's tragicomic despair over his alienation from Lowell -- his housemate and former lover.
For great chunks of the book Miller's handling of this crew is a joy, the characters revealing themselves through a clever and deftly synchronized plot and unflaggingly witty prose. The author, who is Esquire's literary editor, turns out to be an acute social critic and an accomplished psychologist whose narrative skills carry us buoyantly from chapter to chapter in full expectation of some artful resolution. She does all kinds of things well, from building suspense to conveying just how awful it is to work in a meaningless job.
It's a measure of the author's talent that she manages all this despite committing a few of the many sins to which her chosen genre is heir. There is an awful lot of eccentricity here, for example, and while amusing in any one character, in the aggregate it can grow wearisome -- especially when Fergus is on the scene. And a lot of the characters tread awfully close to caricature; perhaps predictably, scatterbrained Merit is married to a man so compulsive he lines up a week's neckties atop the bedroom bureau. The gay men in the book are cross-dressers in this respect, appearing sometimes as fully formed characters and other times clad only in the costumes of stock figures. (We encounter Fergus in a cape, and Lowell appears at least once in an ascot.)
Almost all the men, in fact, regardless of sexual orientation, are feminized bunglers as well as physical and moral weaklings who at the first sign of trouble cry for help from one of the women. But the women are hardly models of self-sufficiency and good judgment either, as Merit shows when she hires an unlettered slacker as her assistant, gives him her company credit card, and then succumbs more fully to his limited charms. Of course, ditsy women and pathetic men are staples of comic fiction, and if Miller's cast is replete with members of this well-worn troupe, for the most part they win our sympathy nonetheless.
The real problem with ''The Coast of Akron" is the last 50 pages or so, in which this seemingly healthy, vigorous narrative undergoes some kind of tragic cardiac arrhythmia and simply falls apart. This collapse is all the more dismaying given what's come before. Novels don't have to have neat endings, but the absence of some credible resolution after nearly 400 pages means that the novelist has failed to redeem not just the characters but very possibly the entire experience. All that fun we had with Merit and Fergus and their crowd in retrospect feels a little tawdry, maybe even voyeuristic. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
It's a durable publishing canard that satisfying fiction has to be about likable characters. That's silly, but if we shouldn't expect always to like the characters we encounter in a novel, we hope nonetheless that their creator will. Conditioned to expect benevolence in a god, we derive comfort from knowing that the author at least cares. Cruelty is no virtue in a novelist, indifference unforgivable. My guess is that Miller succumbed only to exhaustion, which is heartening. Imagine the book she'll write when she learns to pace herself.
Daniel Akst is the author of the novels ''The Webster Chronicle" and ''St. Burl's Obituary." 
