Novel published by Riverhead (Penguin) – 9.1.2009
And so it goes when one visits the bookstore, determined to leave with a purchase. While perusing the Fiction section with my wife-to-be, I stumbled upon Miles From Nowhere, the debut novel from Avon Lady-turned-Pushcart Prize-winning writer Nami Mun.
The book read like a short story collection or a novel-in-stories. Don’t worry, there is a narrative arc. Joon, a teenage Korean immigrant, runs away from home; her father’s own departure from the family triggers a mental breakdown within Joon’s mother. Roaming around the Bronx in the 1980s, Joon (age thirteen as the novel begins) ends up in situations you’d expect for a homeless girl in a borough: working at a “club,” befriending other runaways, dealing with eventual drug addiction and so on.
I’m deliberately leaving out pieces here and there, for sure, but Miles From Nowhere was a well-written, if mildly predictable, variation of the coming-of-age story. From the chapter “Avon”:
I sat across from a TV and my eyes throbbed too much, trying to follow all the magic in I Dream of Jeannie. Jeannie was too happy. Who was she trying to fool? She was crossing her arms and blinking, making a puppy appear and disappear, over and over again, right when a black girl with tight shorts and loopy earrings walked in front of the television set and slipped into the bathroom. The sign above the TV read: NO FOOD, NO DRINK, NO RADIO. It said nothing about shooting up in the bathroom. I’d been waiting for too long and now I was coming down fast, I needed to be high for the abortion.
Joon is a likable character at first; by the end of chapter one, “Shelter,” the reader begins to sympathize with her situation, an empathy that ramps up quickly in chapters two and three, “Nothing About Love or Pity” and “Club Orchid” respectively.
Nonetheless, Joon descends into the individual in the above excerpt, an observant addict dealing with a moral dilemma (flippant dialogue aside, “Avon” illustrates Joon’s desire to improve her life after, by this point, 4-5 yrs on the street). Mun steers clear of having Joon undergo a debauched, disconnected meltdown. Using a first person voice in the past tense, Mun allows her protagonist to reflect with detail, without self-deprecating judgment. It’s a voice that gives the reader a glimmer of hope for Joon throughout the novel. From the chapter “What We Had”:
Benny had round, wishful eyes, and he wanted everything from me. And when I gave him everything and was left with nothing, he wanted that, too. He was always hungry. His body was a long white candle of wax and bones, and he was always hungry. If that wasn’t love, I didn’t know what was.
[...]What did I know about love and fate and fortune back then? These were big words and you could only gain their meaning if you looked up at the sky but I could only look down and see myself in the wet grains of cement, in the cracks, in the moss that grew between the cracks.
Again, each chapter in Miles From Nowhere was a self-contained story, which, arc aside, gives the novel a disjointed feel. With control, Mun moves the reader forward and back through time, with a handful of chapters, maybe two-thousand words each, acting as glimpses or flashbacks into specific moments in Joon’s life, without the niggling need to answer fiction’s many craftwork queries (“But what’s at stake here???”). Mun forces the reader to feel as displaced as Joon and the other supporting characters: children, former and current, ambling through life without the privilege of home, in both the familial and nationalistic definitions of the word.
That said, Miles From Nowhere read, in whole, like a fictional memoir; this is my chief complaint with the book. Anyone who identifies himself as literate knows about the current climate of memoirs: a few, beautiful portraits amid a wasteland of drugs, sexual confusion and eventual redemption. Mun’s writing skills notwithstanding, little separates Miles From Nowhere from other actual memoirs; additionally, little separates it from other novels. A good book, slightly above average, stuck between two genres. Perhaps a stylistic choice on the part of the author, but this netherworld, this blurring of the line between fiction and memoir, mutes the novel’s potential: a case of attempting to do too much. For what it’s worth, kudos to Mun for trying; I can think of a few authors who would benefit from some balls.
Regardless, coming in at two-hundred-eighty-six pages, it’s a novel with enough tension, humor and emotion to entertain and engage the reader. A solid effort from a new talent, Miles From Nowhere thrusts the reader into a messy side of life without heavy-handed sermonizing: a careful, measured choice by the author that shows her attention to craftsmanship. Nami Mun has what it takes to stake claim in the literary world. For its shortcomings, Miles From Nowhere left me excited to see what Mun does next. Can’t ask much more from a debut novel, even one with a bit of an identity crisis.
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