"At last, The Coast of Akron! Adrienne Miller is one of the wittiest and most humane writers we have, bringing to mind at once Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, and M.F.K. Fisher." -Dave Eggers

Adrienne Miller, in her dazzlingly ambitious and hilarious first novel, introduces us to the unforgettable Haven family of Akron, Ohio. This is not your typical Midwestern family, and Lowell Haven is a most unusual patriarch. He's a seducer, a wannabe aristocrat, a liar. Jenny, his former wife, was a brilliant artist, but is today a broken woman with a secret.

In the thirty years since Lowell and Jenny met, Lowell has become a world-famous artist, known for portraits of his favorite subject-himself. But five years ago, Lowell mysteriously stopped painting and the world now demands to know: Why has Lowell Haven abandoned his art? The answer is Merit, Lowell and Jenny's daughter, who is running as fast as she can from her family. Fergus, Lowell's partner, Jenny's ex-best friend, and drama queen extraordinaire, dreams of luring Merit home: the sixty-five-room faux-Tudor mansion where he lives with Lowell. A lavish party for the Midwestern glitterati is the perfect excuse. But his delusions of grandeur loom over the gathering, and his decision to include a certain guest invites disaster.

Stretching from mid-seventies London to the present-day Midwest, The Coast of Akron is a sharply funny and deeply heartbreaking story about the all-too-human urge to own what is unownable.

1

Wyatt’s glasses were crooked again. Merit rinsed her hands in the kitchen sink, shook them, and took three long, resolute steps toward him. She removed his glasses. Wyatt had just come in from mowing the lawn. He smiled. She smiled. Merit and Wyatt had been married for five years.

Merit held the glasses up to the ceiling light. Somehow, every pair went immediately lopsided on Wyatt. These years of repositioning (on three different pairs of glasses) had led Merit to think—and she’d voiced this suspicion more than once, alas—that maybe his ears were crooked, just a little bit.

Wyatt wore long pants (mosquitoes), although it was August and, at 7:00 p.m., ninety degrees. This past week, he’d rigged up an ultraviolet-light mosquito killer. A fan drew the mosquitoes into “the unit” (Wyatt’s term) and into a tray of water. He’d cleverly added a few drops of liquid soap to the water, which, he’d explained, lowered the surface tension. The unit didn’t work tremendously well, in Merit’s opinion, so now Wyatt was, for reasons unclear to Merit, trying to create carbon dioxide. Merit wasn’t sure how one created carbon dioxide exactly, or what it had to do with the mosquitoes; she didn’t like the idea of killing animals, even insects, and didn’t ask.

Wyatt leaned over the sink and washed his hands with dishwashing liquid. Merit got a good look at his backside. Was his ass actually clenched, or did it just appear to be? She had never known. Wyatt could whistle, which Merit could not, but he was, pound for pound, as dreadful a singer as Merit was. Unlike Merit, however, he was oblivious to his talentlessness. His two current around-the-house favorites were “Band on the Run” and “Lady.” If Merit were ever to tell Wyatt how bad his singing voice was, he would certainly disappear into his study, probably for hours, and would possibly stop talking to her for the rest of the day. She knew she was capable of hurting Wyatt. She knew she could hurt him more than he could hurt her.

For Mother’s Day this year, Wyatt had bought Merit a miniature Persian rug mouse pad (priced at a remarkable forty-five dollars on Merit’s fact-finding journey to Alfredo & Me Gifts at the mall) and two packs of paper cocktail napkins decorated with a field full of rusty greenish triangles that were meant to be either sailboats or pine trees. Merit view abbreviated excerpt only...

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