Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles: A Novel
Ever-imaginative Currie (Everything Matters!, 2009) forges a fictionalized persona of himself as a womanizer and self-acclaimed famous author. Suicidal yet determined to set the record straight about his murky past, Ron vows to only speak the capital-T Truth. After his lover (and childhood sweetheart), Emma, exiles him to a remote Caribbean island while she settles her messy divorce, he presumably begins rewriting a novel he lost in a fire, a book that should increase his fame, especially after he decides to fake his own death. But as Emma’s divorce drags on, island-bound Ron indulges in the local custom of drinking from morning to night while mourning his father’s recent death and grappling with his inability to curb his lustful nature and his mounting loneliness. Despite the antihero’s wretchedness, or perhaps because of it, his tale resounds with humor and insight into love, loss, and reality, along with his paranoid visions of a future where technology supplants humankind. An astonishing feat of innovation with surprises on nearly every page, Currie’s entrancing novel marks the work of a scathingly comic virtuoso. --Jonathan Fullmer