Flimsy Little Plastic MiraclesRon Currie Jr.Viking, 2013
Ron Currie Jr. is not only the author of the new novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, he is also the protagonist. Fictional Ron has, like his creator, recently lost a father to cancer and published a novel about it (in the case of the real Currie, it was 2009’s Everything Matters). In Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, the fictional Ron also writes an additional novel, about Emma, his childhood love, now estranged. When that unnamed novel is published, hell breaks loose. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is the pseudo-memoir of fictional Ron in which he guarantees the reader “I will not lie to you,” and again, fifty pages later, “Listen, again, a reiteration: this is me talking to you. This is me telling you the truth.”There are several story lines here dealt out of order. Skipping between the short bursts of narrative is fun, always lands you somewhere unexpected, and must be one of the reasons Currie is often compared to Kurt Vonnegut; another reason being the obvious appeal of his jokes and protestations of honesty to what I expect might be a considerable teen readership. Some of these page-long chapters recount the death of Ron’s father. These memories—often lifted and rewritten only slightly from interviews and blogposts the real Currie has written in recent years—are moving and immediate, but they sit uneasily against the adventures Ron gets up to later, recovering from that death and from a bad breakup.“From the perspective of a novelist,” Ron explains, “there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event.” For Ron these lies include a faked suicide, an anonymous four-year sojourn in the Sinai (in the company of a Bedouin punningly named Asif), and an indefinitely drawn-out spring break on the island of Vieques.In these hyperreal, paragraph-long chapters Currie’s prose wallows in Maileresque bluster. Nubile girls (with “features fragile as a Fabergé egg”) present themselves for his ravishment, but “it had always been this way.” He understands women; he knows violence; but he is grieving for a whole life lost, not only his father but his lost high-school girlfriend Emma. (“My hands and face bore perpetual bruises and scabs while I fought and waited for Emma to be ready for me.”)Emma is first described to us through Ron’s besotted eyes as a woman whose loveliness “exposes language for the woefully limited means of communication that it is.” Emma is possessed of a beauty that keeps “men swirling around her,” but also of a “Biblical furor” that makes her sex life with Ron passionately brutal. But she comes from an abusive home and needs some space from Ron. It is this abandonment—never experienced by the reader as movingly as we feel Ron’s father’s death--which sets Ron to brooding, drinking, and clobbering the locals (and being clobbered by a number of those locals in return).In theory, the reader cannot easily draw the line between what is “true” what is “fiction” here, moving us to reconsider what it means to recount the facts of suffering, or what story to “believe,” but in this novel at least, the suspension fails to homogenize. Emma, unlike Ron’s father, remains an abstraction, despite or because of the praise heaped on her, and there are no other major characters that seem as if they could have been observed from life. If the romp-and-stomp island scenes were pure farce they might make for fun reading, but they’re intermixed with real sentimentality—we’re meant to experience the pain of Emma’s leaving, and of Ron’s disillusionment, and when we’re told that Ron subsequently transformed the whole into a breakup book (“the hottest literary commodity since Harry Potter”) which makes his name more famous “among certain demographics” than The President of the United States, we simply can’t fit that fantasy into the world in which the Ron Jr. made dying so real.It should be noted here that Currie’s prose is often excellent: self-consciously colloquial in the manner of George Saunders and full of brilliant similes that can sneak up and floor you (e.g. “the palm fronds chattered in the breeze, sounding like a squadron of prehistoric insects”). The more ‘real’ sections of the novel, those in which Ron cares for his dying father (cleans up after him, drives him awkwardly to a bad Disney film) describe a loving son confused and outraged by the thing that is happening to the strong man he knew. This stuff is as hard to tear your eyes from as the scene of a fatal crash. It’s the small moments of these passages which are affecting precisely because of their realism, a quality absent from the rest of the book.In short: it’s exactly the most obviously fictional parts of this fantastical memoir that we least believe.This is contrary to the designs of the fictional Ron Currie Jr., but it doesn’t detract from what’s moving about so many of these pages. In a TLS review of another fictionalized autobiography, Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, M. John Harrison writes “by the end of the novel we don't believe in any Bret Easton Ellis, real or otherwise.” Here, this is not the case. By the end of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles we believe in the real Ron Currie Jr. completely, the fictional Ron Currie Jr. not so much.____John Cotter is a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly. His criticism has appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, Brooklyn Rail, and Bookforum. His novel Under the Small Lights is available from Miami University Press and his short story “The Arcadia Project” about the painter Thomas Eakins appears in the current issue of Puerto Del Sol.
