wantnotSo many things have changed since 9-11.

Nothing really changed; we just made choices, and some of them were wrong. We are different because of those choices, older, and with a newfound inability to concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds. Our society has lost its way; we prefer to naval gaze, while over-sharing has become the goal of “every class”. I entered this novel without really knowing what Mr. Miles was capable of, having struggled mightily with his debut, Dear American Airlines.

We meet dumpster divers Micah and Talmadge, who are successfully living off the grid and squatting in an abandon building on the lower east side of New York City. The digs are grim, no one should live like this. I wasn’t overly impressed with these two, but when I got to the final paragraph of this opening chapter, the details were delicious. Miles delivers a punch that you will never recover from, there is no going back to the dumpster to eat after you have seen what Talmadge has, and later what Micah happily discovers. Along comes an old friend, college buddy of Talmadge’s, whose funny story about going cross-country is one of the countless pleasures lurking on every page of this novel. These people are detailed, interesting, and Miles smooths out every wrinkle in their miserable existence, even if their crumpled shadows say otherwise.

Elwin, sad-sack linguistics teacher, freshly divorced, his ex having gone off to screw a chef. She becomes a permanent ghost in Elwin’s life. We’ve seen this before, but then something happens. On the road home from commiserating with a fellow loser in the marriage game, Elwin hits a deer. What follows is a seat-of-your-pants examination of what a single man does when no one is looking. Mr. Miles then injects a neighbor, who shadows Elwin for a while. At this point I was in awe, just waiting for the next great thing to unfold. It reminded me of A.M. Homes and her masterwork May We Be Forgiven, where stuff just keeps happening.

9-11 looms in the form of a woman made widow by the events of that day. Sara is digging through her storage locker, and uncovers pictures of her husband, who died in the towers. She is not that shook up by it; due to the fact that she found out he was having an affair with a co-worker of his, albeit, after he died. She digs this info out of his emails, and then contacts this co-worker. Presto. We hate what has happened to Sara, and pity her, no matter how tuned out she is. I loved Sara, but adored her second husband, the debt collector Dave, and Sara’s skid-mark daughter Alexis. To spoil Dave for you would be criminal. His tactics are fierce, riddled with complexity, and moral uncertainty. Reading Dave and Sara is like seeing the American dream morph into a horror story, Kubrick style. Alexis drives her own bus, and watching her melt down to human sawdust was thrilling. I read the last “Alexis chapter” with my hands over my eyes. It was that grueling. But what happens next? It is way beyond anything that I could ever have dreamed up. Talmadge and his friend shit the bed, Micah wants a baby, but can’t feed it garbage. Elwin is involved with a group that is tasked to come up with a warning sign for a nuclear dump in the desert. They know the waste will last millions of years, but need to warn future cultures of the hazard. It’s hard to sum this book up, difficult to say if I’d want to see more of Talmadge, or his friend. I would like to know how Micah turned out. When you first meet her, she is weak tea, and then along comes her back story, and she sits on your chest like a meth-loving zebra.

All this to say; it is very hard to read a book that makes you vibrant with envy. This is an anti-romantic fairy tale; Talmadge plucks Micah from her world, and never really lets it be known that he is just in it for a good time. The big bad world is everywhere, and it never goes away. Talmadge’s return to the grid would have cropped up like an ingrown toenail, until surgery removed Micah from the equation. Matty, that friend from the past, weaves together two story lines while preying on the unsuspecting bounty found in dumpsters. If you have ever wondered why dumpsters are locked? Matty is the reason. Sara and Dave are not atypical, they are the norm, you would find them at any food court in America, except that Dave would be overweight, with receding hair, and a goatee. Sara would be drowning in Banana Republic gear, with Victoria’s Secret unmentionables tucked inside. That is not a bad thing, just the things that are out there. What Sara and Dave are lacking is an edge to their existence, regenerative, and cultured. They send their daughter off to college, and the rest of their lives are focused on how to make more profit on top of their already growing pile of money.

It’s “the hole we’re in” that Miles brings into sharp relief, but we just can’t stop digging. The post modern suburbs are nothing more than an updated version of Roanoke, trafficked by slow-moving slobs slithering through the mine field of foreclosures. Elwin is the only character that actually recovers his mojo by giving away every possession he owns. But along the way his neighbor thrusts a new-fangled jeep on him, and off he goes, into the petroleum high of an SUV. Miles makes it clear that our species is finished. We’ve had our fun, and now it’s time to leave. We have thrown away greatness, absolved our selves of responsibility by mainlining the anesthesia wafting off our stuff. He makes it clear that in a million years the trappings of our existence will be reduced to the toxic waste we have left behind. The future was yesterday; we can’t go back, because our smart phones are leading the way.