Fight No More

Starred review from April 1, 2018
Real estate--and the anxiety and disruption that often come with moving house--drives this linked collection of Los Angeles-set tales.Millet has used broken relationships as a launchpad for austere, absurdist fiction (Magnificence, 2012; Sweet Lamb of Heaven, 2016) and laugh-out-loud farce (Mermaids in Paradise, 2014). Here, her attack is more compassionate and realistic, but she can still bring the weird: In one story, a woman believes her home is being overrun by "handyman midgets" who arrive unsolicited to make repairs; how much of this is real and how much is the panicked vision of a woman who's just been abandoned by her husband is intentionally vague. The central (and more grounded) figure in these stories is Nina, a real estate agent who must bear witness to the vicissitudes and cruelties of her clients: the famous musician who tries to drown himself in the pool of one home; the rebellious teen determined to force potential buyers to witness unmistakable evidence of his masturbatory habits; the wealthy, arrogant man who's led his mistress to believe she's his fiancee. Nina herself can't find a professional distance from these shenanigans, falling for a member of the musician's entourage in a relationship that ends tragically. Changing homes brings out our generosity and monstrousness in equal measure, Millet seems to suggest, an idea she explores most potently in a trio of stories featuring Lexie, a teenage sex worker whose safe job as an au pair is threatened by her sexually abusive stepfather. Those stories are especially strong because Millet so readily shifts point of view--by turns she can be a snotty rich kid, a pedophile, and a lower-class cam girl striving to rise above her station. And though Millet has never been much for easy uplift, the collection ends with the sense that our lives can find some kind of order if we acknowledge the forces that disrupt them.A linked-story collection done right, with sensitive and complex characters each looking for a place to call home.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 23, 2018
Millet’s irresistible latest (following Sweet Lamb of Heaven) is a series of loosely connected stories centering on Los Angeles real estate, eccentric musicians, and a dysfunctional family on the verge of implosion. In “To Think/I Killed a Cat,” readers are introduced to rebellious teen Jeremy, plotting to sabotage the sale of his family house. Readers also meet his father’s scandalously young and pregnant new flame, Lora, who features in “The Fall of Berlin” as a trophy wife coping with her new surroundings to the bemusement of her new relations. The cast gradually expands to include a haunted au pair named Lexie; her predatory stepfather, Pete; and, in the title story, suicidal musician Lordy and his bandmates Ry and Lynn. These characters float in and out of each other’s lives throughout the stories, which include a warped retelling of Snow White in “The Men,” and a realtor mistaking Lordy for a foreign dictator in “Libertines.” Millet’s emphasis is on the inner lives of her characters, as they ruminate on subjects like Hieronymus Bosch, Joseph Stalin, and vampires. The aggregate effect makes this collection a sprawling, tender portrait of modern adults quietly trapped by their youthful aspirations.

Starred review from May 15, 2018
When Nina was eight years old, her catastrophically depressed and neglectful mother asked her, Can you feel the pain that resides in all beings? Given the high empathy quotient in her previous work, including her last novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (2016), one would expect Millet herself to answer in the affirmative, even though she has a gift for discerning humor in dire predicaments. This first story collection since Love in Infant Monkeys (2009) is a book of adeptly interlocked tales revolving around skilled and stoic Los Angeles real-estate agent Nina, whose clients range from a pragmatic vampire to a successful businesswoman convinced that seven dwarfs have taken over her house. Each property Nina shows becomes a stage for dramas wrenching, ludicrous, hilarious, or all three at once. She falls in love after a potential buyer nearly drowns in a client's swimming pool. Another listing inadvertently sets in motion unlikely and alarming events as a family copes with divorce and a second marriage, bringing together angry teenager Jeremy; resilient and resourceful Lexie, an underage internet porn actor grateful to escape her sexually abusive stepfather; and Jeremy's smart, acerbic grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and university professor reluctantly leaving her beloved home.As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love. Place Millet's latest beside connected-story collections by Eizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge, 2008; Anything Is Possible, 2017), Ann Beattie (The State We're In, 2015), and Michelle Latiolais (She, 2016). The simultaneous reissue of Millet's first novel, Omnivores (1996), confirms the evolution of this stellar author's vital, caring, and audacious creativity and literary splendor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2018

Showing a high-end California house to a man she assumes to be an African dictator, brisk, self-contained real estate agent Nina is shaken when the man plunges into the pool and must be revived by paramedics. She learns that he's actually a musician, with his presumed bodyguards his band members, and in the course of this wise and witty new collection--Millet's first since the Pulitzer Prize finalist Love in Infant Monkeys--she connects with one of the musicians, though her love is slammed by tragedy. Connection is the key throughout, as these stories interlock like the veins in a leaf. For instance, we keep meeting troubled teen Jem, who slyly disrupts Nina's showing of his divorced mother's house and gets abused teen Lexie, whom he's met via cybersex, a babysitting job with his father and stepmother. Jem grows over these pages, genuinely helping Lexie and his sharp-witted if ailing gram, no slouch herself. Meanwhile, Nina contends with a client who thinks she has dwarves in the attic. VERDICT Top-notch, in-your-face work from the priceless Millet. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.