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Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles
In this tour de force of imagination, Ron Currie asks why literal veracity means more to us than deeper truths, creating yet again a genre-bending novel that will at once dazzle, move, and provoke.
The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.’s new novel has a problem—or rather, several of them. He’s a writer whose latest book was destroyed in a fire. He’s mourning the death of his father, and has been in love with the same woman since grade school, a woman whose beauty and allure is matched only by her talent for eluding him. Worst of all, he’s not even his own man, but rather an amalgam of fact and fiction from Ron Currie’s own life. When Currie the character exiles himself to a small Caribbean island to write a new book about the woman he loves, he eventually decides to fake his death, which turns out to be the best career move he’s ever made. But fame and fortune come with a price, and Currie learns that in a time of twenty-four-hour news cycles, reality TV, and celebrity Twitter feeds, the one thing the world will not forgive is having been told a deeply satisfying lie.
What kind of distinction could, or should, be drawn between Currie the author and Currie the character? Or between the book you hold in your hands and the novel embedded in it? Whatever the answers, Currie, an inventive writer always eager to test the boundaries of storytelling in provocative ways, has essential things to impart along the way about heartbreak, reality, grief, deceit, human frailty, and blinding love.
The protagonist of Ron Currie, Jr.’s new novel has a problem—or rather, several of them. He’s a writer whose latest book was destroyed in a fire. He’s mourning the death of his father, and has been in love with the same woman since grade school, a woman whose beauty and allure is matched only by her talent for eluding him. Worst of all, he’s not even his own man, but rather an amalgam of fact and fiction from Ron Currie’s own life. When Currie the character exiles himself to a small Caribbean island to write a new book about the woman he loves, he eventually decides to fake his death, which turns out to be the best career move he’s ever made. But fame and fortune come with a price, and Currie learns that in a time of twenty-four-hour news cycles, reality TV, and celebrity Twitter feeds, the one thing the world will not forgive is having been told a deeply satisfying lie.
What kind of distinction could, or should, be drawn between Currie the author and Currie the character? Or between the book you hold in your hands and the novel embedded in it? Whatever the answers, Currie, an inventive writer always eager to test the boundaries of storytelling in provocative ways, has essential things to impart along the way about heartbreak, reality, grief, deceit, human frailty, and blinding love.
340 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2013
52 people are currently reading
2518 people want to read
About the author
Ron Currie Jr.
8 books564 followersRon Currie, Jr. was born and raised in Waterville, Maine, where he still lives. His first book, God is Dead, won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His debut novel, Everything Matters!, will be translated into a dozen languages, and is a July Indie Next Pick and Amazon Best of June 2009 selection.
His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ninth Letter, Swink, The Southeast Review, Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, The Cincinnati Review, Harpur Palate, and New Sudden Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2007).
His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ninth Letter, Swink, The Southeast Review, Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, The Cincinnati Review, Harpur Palate, and New Sudden Fiction (W.W. Norton, 2007).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 250 reviews
October 1, 2018
if you like your love stories unconventional and ultimately sad (ach, don't wave that spoiler-finger at me - that is a page-19 spoiler), then this is probably a good match for you.
it is about the frailty of human romantic love, the power of the written word, the difficulties that "truth" faces in our works of fiction, how to leave someone for their own good, what the living have to witness in the slow death of another, and the possibilities of the singularity.
i know, right?
this is my first ron currie, but now i know i am going to backtrack and get on his earlier works. his writing is that perfect blend of storytelling and delightful meta-humor that those gregs and mfsos like so much.
and it's got that mainline-to-tragedy that reads my mail.
so everyone wins.
at its root, this is indeed a love story, but this story shifts between the past and the present, the death of the ron-currie-named writer-narrator's father, ray kurzweil's predictions about the machiiiiiines
and the blurry boundaries of truth.
the love bits are the operatic, all-consuming, violent-bedroom kinds of love. two people who cannot live without each other, but who most often find themselves apart. and the painful but necessary realities of this kind of explosive love. the selfless giving everything up for another.and the aftermath - not a finding-of-self in the absence of the love-object, but a conscious negation of self - up to and including an attempt at the ultimate negation.
is that vague enough?
because i want you people to read this, so i don't want to broadcast its secrets and its journey. but i also don't want to be so vague that you will just goggle-eye me.
it's sad and lovely, and you might be surprised by the reversals of what-is-sad and what-is-lovely.
that's all you get for now.
bide your time...
come to my blog!
it is about the frailty of human romantic love, the power of the written word, the difficulties that "truth" faces in our works of fiction, how to leave someone for their own good, what the living have to witness in the slow death of another, and the possibilities of the singularity.
i know, right?
this is my first ron currie, but now i know i am going to backtrack and get on his earlier works. his writing is that perfect blend of storytelling and delightful meta-humor that those gregs and mfsos like so much.
and it's got that mainline-to-tragedy that reads my mail.
so everyone wins.
at its root, this is indeed a love story, but this story shifts between the past and the present, the death of the ron-currie-named writer-narrator's father, ray kurzweil's predictions about the machiiiiiines
and the blurry boundaries of truth.
the love bits are the operatic, all-consuming, violent-bedroom kinds of love. two people who cannot live without each other, but who most often find themselves apart. and the painful but necessary realities of this kind of explosive love. the selfless giving everything up for another.and the aftermath - not a finding-of-self in the absence of the love-object, but a conscious negation of self - up to and including an attempt at the ultimate negation.
is that vague enough?
because i want you people to read this, so i don't want to broadcast its secrets and its journey. but i also don't want to be so vague that you will just goggle-eye me.
it's sad and lovely, and you might be surprised by the reversals of what-is-sad and what-is-lovely.
that's all you get for now.
bide your time...
come to my blog!
June 19, 2015
I did not read any of Currie’s earlier works, so I did not know until now that his previous novels were so well received. But I could tell upon beginning this book that this was someone who bumped up hard against sudden celebrity—those moments when everyone seems to think they know you intimately. Not so fast, Currie seems to say.
The book tells of a character named Ron Currie who is perpetually “in recovery” over the love of a woman, Emma, who returns his love but marries another. The book’s narrator leads a life of dissipation on a Caribbean isle while ostensibly writing another book. The book he ends up writing is all about Emma.
This is a book about the nature of fiction. A novel, by its very definition, is fiction, or lies, or “not factual.” But Currie goes to some lengths to point out that it is not necessarily “untruth.” Fiction may be more truth than real truth, he seems to say.
Fiction, Currie tells us, does not tell us how much he loves his Emma. It tells us how much we readers love our special person. It gives us words for things we cannot articulate, but that we feel none-the-less. The closeness we feel with an author is illusion, since they are lying and we are not. The feelings the author evokes are real. The author sets us up for connection, and if he succeeds, we do connect.
Anyway, to get to the end, we spend quite a lot of time navel-gazing…at Currie’s navel. This is self-conscious literature by someone who suggests that fiction succeeds when the author writes “honestly,” and allows readers to believe. (I just learned the term for self-recognizing fiction, or fiction that draws attention to itself as fiction is metafiction. )
If this is metafiction, that bit about dissipation on the island felt too honest, and evoked in me the feeling that Currie knew a little too much about drinking, fighting, rough sex, and driving off piers with the intent to kill. True or not, it’s too close for comfort, and I want to tell him to knock it off. I want to tell him to have a look at Saunder's new book, Tenth of December: Stories. This is someone who came out on the other side of "what fiction is" with his sense of humor intact.
So, what are Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles? I’m not telling. You go find out for yourself. But I’m sort of scratching my head over the title still. I have no idea why they didn’t name it The Singularity.
--------------
6.18.15
I revised this review to reflect that this was not his second novel as I had thought. But as I read it over, I realized Karl Ove Knausgård would have something to talk about with this fellow who was doing what Knausgaard was doing about the same time.
The book tells of a character named Ron Currie who is perpetually “in recovery” over the love of a woman, Emma, who returns his love but marries another. The book’s narrator leads a life of dissipation on a Caribbean isle while ostensibly writing another book. The book he ends up writing is all about Emma.
This is a book about the nature of fiction. A novel, by its very definition, is fiction, or lies, or “not factual.” But Currie goes to some lengths to point out that it is not necessarily “untruth.” Fiction may be more truth than real truth, he seems to say.
“From the perspective of a novelist, there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate how something actually feels in a way that mere facts cannot.”At its best, this novel could be read as a defense for James Frey, whose fictional memoir, A Million Little Pieces, about his time battling drug addiction, hit the world stage like a bomb. Frey was giving a better truth, a more real truth, and those truths were no less true than the truth.
Fiction, Currie tells us, does not tell us how much he loves his Emma. It tells us how much we readers love our special person. It gives us words for things we cannot articulate, but that we feel none-the-less. The closeness we feel with an author is illusion, since they are lying and we are not. The feelings the author evokes are real. The author sets us up for connection, and if he succeeds, we do connect.
Anyway, to get to the end, we spend quite a lot of time navel-gazing…at Currie’s navel. This is self-conscious literature by someone who suggests that fiction succeeds when the author writes “honestly,” and allows readers to believe. (I just learned the term for self-recognizing fiction, or fiction that draws attention to itself as fiction is metafiction. )
If this is metafiction, that bit about dissipation on the island felt too honest, and evoked in me the feeling that Currie knew a little too much about drinking, fighting, rough sex, and driving off piers with the intent to kill. True or not, it’s too close for comfort, and I want to tell him to knock it off. I want to tell him to have a look at Saunder's new book, Tenth of December: Stories. This is someone who came out on the other side of "what fiction is" with his sense of humor intact.
So, what are Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles? I’m not telling. You go find out for yourself. But I’m sort of scratching my head over the title still. I have no idea why they didn’t name it The Singularity.
--------------
6.18.15
I revised this review to reflect that this was not his second novel as I had thought. But as I read it over, I realized Karl Ove Knausgård would have something to talk about with this fellow who was doing what Knausgaard was doing about the same time.
March 2, 2013
"Emma tried to run away..."
This song keeps running through my head when I think of this book. Or the first part of it anyway.
"Another theory I find appealing is that the Singularity could and likely will render the body, and therefore sex, and therefore by extension romantic love, as obsolete as a Walkman personal stereo."
For various reasons this novel was difficult for me to read.
The novel itself isn't written in a difficult manner, I just had a hard time getting through some of the sections. Sometimes you read a book and it's the right book for the right time in your life. This isn't one of those for me.
I still liked it quite a bit. It just didn't make for an enjoyable reading experience.
The basic premise of the novel is the protagonist, Ron Currie, Jr., a fairly obscure young writer becomes a household name after he apparently commits sucide and his unfinished novel is published and becomes the kind of book that everyone reads.
But he didn't kill himself, and when he returns to the world of the living their is the inevitable uproar of the duped public.
This is one strand of the book, and, as the title might suggest it is playing around with the whole James Frey fiasco.
Can you feel duped by fiction?
I guess ask fans of JT LeRoy.
There is that story going on.
There is a strand about the Singularity and what will it mean for what we think about what makes humans human.
There is also the back story. The story of a boy and a girl who seem destined to be together but don't. The girl needs some space so she sends the boy off to a small island in the Caribbean, where the boy drinks and fights and ruins his life, and ultimately fakes his own death.
And there is the strand about Ron Currie, Jr's., family.
Quite a few strands in this fairly short novel, and they are constantly weaving in and out with one another through a series of James Patterson-short passages.
The result of this for me was a fairly sad but fun book. The subject matter is mostly melancholy, but the there is a playful manner in the storytelling and the non-serious use of some meta-fiction conventions that make this sort of a depressing beach-read kind of novel for people who like say, DFW or Ben Marcus.
This song keeps running through my head when I think of this book. Or the first part of it anyway.
"Another theory I find appealing is that the Singularity could and likely will render the body, and therefore sex, and therefore by extension romantic love, as obsolete as a Walkman personal stereo."
For various reasons this novel was difficult for me to read.
The novel itself isn't written in a difficult manner, I just had a hard time getting through some of the sections. Sometimes you read a book and it's the right book for the right time in your life. This isn't one of those for me.
I still liked it quite a bit. It just didn't make for an enjoyable reading experience.
The basic premise of the novel is the protagonist, Ron Currie, Jr., a fairly obscure young writer becomes a household name after he apparently commits sucide and his unfinished novel is published and becomes the kind of book that everyone reads.
But he didn't kill himself, and when he returns to the world of the living their is the inevitable uproar of the duped public.
This is one strand of the book, and, as the title might suggest it is playing around with the whole James Frey fiasco.
Can you feel duped by fiction?
I guess ask fans of JT LeRoy.
There is that story going on.
There is a strand about the Singularity and what will it mean for what we think about what makes humans human.
There is also the back story. The story of a boy and a girl who seem destined to be together but don't. The girl needs some space so she sends the boy off to a small island in the Caribbean, where the boy drinks and fights and ruins his life, and ultimately fakes his own death.
And there is the strand about Ron Currie, Jr's., family.
Quite a few strands in this fairly short novel, and they are constantly weaving in and out with one another through a series of James Patterson-short passages.
The result of this for me was a fairly sad but fun book. The subject matter is mostly melancholy, but the there is a playful manner in the storytelling and the non-serious use of some meta-fiction conventions that make this sort of a depressing beach-read kind of novel for people who like say, DFW or Ben Marcus.
June 17, 2015
http://www.themaineedge.com/buzz/meta...
“Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles” is a whirlwind of imagination and insight. It’s the sort of novel that not only openly challenges the reader, but does so with grace and gusto. What Currie has created is a fictional memoir – a sort of unauthorized autobiography – that blurs the line between life and literature. Could it be that the book being written in the book is actually the book that we are now reading? That it’s even a question speaks volumes about Currie’s creativity and craftsmanship.
This is the kind of metafictional exercise that could very well wind up seeming self-serving and pedantic in the hands of a lesser talent. In Currie’s hands, however, it is a vivid work of vision; a most ingeniously original work. It is clever without being condescending and evocative without being over-the-top – not to mention one of the funniest books I’ve read in ages.
“Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles” is fiction that transcends the traditional telling of tales. Currie has found a pathway to the epic through intimacy, creating something great by way of the small. By using himself as a stand-in for all the little fictions we create for ourselves every day, he has mined a larger truth. This is a powerfully moving and stimulating work.
“Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles” is a whirlwind of imagination and insight. It’s the sort of novel that not only openly challenges the reader, but does so with grace and gusto. What Currie has created is a fictional memoir – a sort of unauthorized autobiography – that blurs the line between life and literature. Could it be that the book being written in the book is actually the book that we are now reading? That it’s even a question speaks volumes about Currie’s creativity and craftsmanship.
This is the kind of metafictional exercise that could very well wind up seeming self-serving and pedantic in the hands of a lesser talent. In Currie’s hands, however, it is a vivid work of vision; a most ingeniously original work. It is clever without being condescending and evocative without being over-the-top – not to mention one of the funniest books I’ve read in ages.
“Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles” is fiction that transcends the traditional telling of tales. Currie has found a pathway to the epic through intimacy, creating something great by way of the small. By using himself as a stand-in for all the little fictions we create for ourselves every day, he has mined a larger truth. This is a powerfully moving and stimulating work.
February 22, 2013
I liked this book. I liked it, a lot. But I am not sure that I can explain why, or maybe, I'm not willing to explain. At least not about how it resonated with me, or how I related to it. Maybe I’m a coward, but so be it.
Moving right along...I've been a fan of Currie's since I stumbled across his first book of stories God Is Dead and his great novel Everything Matters! so it was only natural that I pick up his third book right away.
The first thing you’ll notice about this book is how the text is laid out on the page. For the most part, each page could be considered a chapter. Sometimes the text will bleed over to the next page, but the way the novel is structured seemed to propel me forward. At times I found it hard to stop and what reader doesn't like it when that happens?
It’s a love story, but not a traditional one. It’s a story about truth, and what it means or doesn’t mean. It’s also about the coming (?) singularity, and what’s not to like about that (aside from total human destruction at the hands of self-replicating nanobots)?
Moving right along...I've been a fan of Currie's since I stumbled across his first book of stories God Is Dead and his great novel Everything Matters! so it was only natural that I pick up his third book right away.
The first thing you’ll notice about this book is how the text is laid out on the page. For the most part, each page could be considered a chapter. Sometimes the text will bleed over to the next page, but the way the novel is structured seemed to propel me forward. At times I found it hard to stop and what reader doesn't like it when that happens?
It’s a love story, but not a traditional one. It’s a story about truth, and what it means or doesn’t mean. It’s also about the coming (?) singularity, and what’s not to like about that (aside from total human destruction at the hands of self-replicating nanobots)?
February 8, 2013
I'll never get postmodern fiction, ever. I like my novels nicely organized, with neat transitions. It's weird. I enjoy chaos in the form of stream-of-consciousness, but I don't enjoy postmodern. That was one of the main reasons for my intense dislike of this book. It speaks more of my tastes, rather than of the novel, but as aptly put by the author-protagonist, we are perception machines. But, that's not my only reason for loathing this thing.
The plot which finds, at the beginning, the protagonist, also Ron Currie Jr., in the middle of a separation from the only woman he ever loved, Emma. Emma has thrown him away, because she wants to find herself. He lands in Caribbean, drinks a lot, and wastes not much time in shacking up with a young college dropout who worships the ground he walks on. Apparently this is not a spoiler, he fakes his death after giving the drop-out the boot, and gets himself booted out by Emma for a second time. He goes away to the middle east, leaving behind a fake suicide note and an unfinished novel. This gets published. And typically, there's much reckoning that follows.
As I've already established, I loathe the style. The writing is solid within separate paragraphs, but the transitions from one subject to another have no rhyme nor reason. Apart from Currie's all-encompassing, unhealthy obsession with Emma, we also get musings about his father, who died of cancer. We get some insight into Emma's horrible childhood, which I suppose we're to take as the basis for her acting out as a bitch. We get a lot of musings of the concept of Singularity which Currie seems to support. And we get current Ron Currie, doing a lot of drinking and fist-fighting among other things. These are all fine by themselves. But the random way in which Currie (the author) shoehorns them is too distracting to be any good. After a while I dreaded the finish of a paragraph.
I also hated the obsessive way in which Currie carried on about Emma. There was nothing in the rhapsody that signified any love, let alone something true. Currie spends more than half the novel talking about how he was always there for her and she wasn't. She used him and then she left him. She came back to his life and then she ditched him again. In other words, she was the unattainable object of his desire, because that was her choice. Abruptly though, in the latter half of the book, there's a switch. She comes back (again, see how tedious this is?), and we're told that she was always constant and that it was him who was faithless. We're supposed to take that on faith, because there's nothing in the novel up until then that Emma was at all serious about Currie other than the violent sex she was enjoying with him.
Incidentally we don't get much about Currie's early life beyond his lust for Emma at the age of sixteen. He mentions that he had conversations with his three sisters, so he understands women (!!!!) and then ignores them for the rest of the book. He also disproves everything about understanding women, by being dense and obtuse about every woman he comes across. He asserts that he had a good childhood and that his relationship with his family was good, so I think we're to assume his wonderful (not) personality is his own. He's extremely self centered, concerns himself with only what affects him, and brings a lot of grief to a lot of people. And yet he gets off easy. They all welcome him back, with a slap or a law suit, true, but they do. He's a horrible and unsympathetic character, so I was just happy for Emma that she kicked him out.
So, a book about an arrogant, unfeeling and sexist man, which is also shabbily organized. I'm still giving this two stars, as I'm not sure this is an objective review, given my dislike for the style. But I know this for sure, I honestly don't care to read Currie Jr. ever again.
Edit: I'm surprised as I check the novel description here on Goodreads, as there's literally nothing else in the book other than some description of stomach churning sex. The plot is thoroughly explained, so my entire paragraph explaining the plot was a waste of time and space.
The plot which finds, at the beginning, the protagonist, also Ron Currie Jr., in the middle of a separation from the only woman he ever loved, Emma. Emma has thrown him away, because she wants to find herself. He lands in Caribbean, drinks a lot, and wastes not much time in shacking up with a young college dropout who worships the ground he walks on. Apparently this is not a spoiler, he fakes his death after giving the drop-out the boot, and gets himself booted out by Emma for a second time. He goes away to the middle east, leaving behind a fake suicide note and an unfinished novel. This gets published. And typically, there's much reckoning that follows.
As I've already established, I loathe the style. The writing is solid within separate paragraphs, but the transitions from one subject to another have no rhyme nor reason. Apart from Currie's all-encompassing, unhealthy obsession with Emma, we also get musings about his father, who died of cancer. We get some insight into Emma's horrible childhood, which I suppose we're to take as the basis for her acting out as a bitch. We get a lot of musings of the concept of Singularity which Currie seems to support. And we get current Ron Currie, doing a lot of drinking and fist-fighting among other things. These are all fine by themselves. But the random way in which Currie (the author) shoehorns them is too distracting to be any good. After a while I dreaded the finish of a paragraph.
I also hated the obsessive way in which Currie carried on about Emma. There was nothing in the rhapsody that signified any love, let alone something true. Currie spends more than half the novel talking about how he was always there for her and she wasn't. She used him and then she left him. She came back to his life and then she ditched him again. In other words, she was the unattainable object of his desire, because that was her choice. Abruptly though, in the latter half of the book, there's a switch. She comes back (again, see how tedious this is?), and we're told that she was always constant and that it was him who was faithless. We're supposed to take that on faith, because there's nothing in the novel up until then that Emma was at all serious about Currie other than the violent sex she was enjoying with him.
Incidentally we don't get much about Currie's early life beyond his lust for Emma at the age of sixteen. He mentions that he had conversations with his three sisters, so he understands women (!!!!) and then ignores them for the rest of the book. He also disproves everything about understanding women, by being dense and obtuse about every woman he comes across. He asserts that he had a good childhood and that his relationship with his family was good, so I think we're to assume his wonderful (not) personality is his own. He's extremely self centered, concerns himself with only what affects him, and brings a lot of grief to a lot of people. And yet he gets off easy. They all welcome him back, with a slap or a law suit, true, but they do. He's a horrible and unsympathetic character, so I was just happy for Emma that she kicked him out.
So, a book about an arrogant, unfeeling and sexist man, which is also shabbily organized. I'm still giving this two stars, as I'm not sure this is an objective review, given my dislike for the style. But I know this for sure, I honestly don't care to read Currie Jr. ever again.
Edit: I'm surprised as I check the novel description here on Goodreads, as there's literally nothing else in the book other than some description of stomach churning sex. The plot is thoroughly explained, so my entire paragraph explaining the plot was a waste of time and space.
February 24, 2013
This book was terrible. After 10 pages I thought it might be okay. 50 pages into it I decided the main character was a jerk alcoholic and his girlfriend was selfish and didn't really love him. It was so dark. I skimmed the rest of the book. Why? I'm not sure. I feel like I need to apologize to myself for staying up until midnight reading this garbage. The chapter on computers taking over the world were skimmed over quickly. The chapters about his father dying were sad and the chapter about him, his girlfriend, his fake suicide frustrated me. I feel like you need to like the main character in a book - at the least - to enjoy a book. This book got rave reviews. I am beginning to wonder if I can trust reviews. This book well and truly sucked the life out of me for a few hours don't let it do the same to you.
March 4, 2013
In one of my favorite movies, "It's a Wonderful Life," George Bailey attempts suicide on a Christmas Eve when all seems hopeless. He jumps off a bridge into a near freezing river, only to be saved by an angel. After the angel shows George how his life mattered to those around him (by showing what would have happened to them had he never lived), George is resurrected into his old life with all of its messiness and heartache only to realize that no matter what, his life is filled with wonder.
Not so much for Ron Currie, the protagonist in Ron Currie Jr.'s latest novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. I'm spoiling nothing for you by telling you that Ron Currie attempts suicide in the book. He tells you the same from the get go, even though you won't get to the actual attempt until well past the halfway mark.
What Ron discovers after his own self-resurrection is not that life is filled with wonder but that it remains flawed and the pain that brought him to his breaking point, still exists, much like a craving for nicotine is returned when one removes the patch that is supposed to take that craving away.
Basically, there is no cure for pain. There is no cure for grief. There is no cure for heartache. The only thing one can do is put one foot in front of the other and get through it. Getting through it might mean that you take yourself away from those people who love you. It might mean that you self-medicate. You might create a vision for the future based on the singularity. In this vision you give as a gift to yourself a world in which we are all machines and grief no longer exists. Death is no more.
Or it might mean that you don't believe yourself capable of living through the pain and so you do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.
You might even write a book about pain and your process of grief. That book might be a fictional memoir or a memoiresque piece of fiction. In that book you might find a cross hatch of grief and heartache. A smear of regret. A smudge of self-loathing. You might find yourself rewriting your life as you believed it happened: Your sex always ended in orgasm. Or you might tell the truth: you believe you failed your dying father when he needed you most. Ultimately, the love story you might think you're telling--the one about the one who got away--is really about how you raised yourself up from the dead and managed to model yourself after your father--war veteran, witnesser of horrors untold--who kept hoping to witness the cherry blossoms in the trees he planted even though he knew he'd die before spring ever came.
In the end, you can decide to live. Stick that nicotine patch back on. Listen for the bell ringing on the Christmas tree. Watch for the blossoms.
Not so much for Ron Currie, the protagonist in Ron Currie Jr.'s latest novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. I'm spoiling nothing for you by telling you that Ron Currie attempts suicide in the book. He tells you the same from the get go, even though you won't get to the actual attempt until well past the halfway mark.
What Ron discovers after his own self-resurrection is not that life is filled with wonder but that it remains flawed and the pain that brought him to his breaking point, still exists, much like a craving for nicotine is returned when one removes the patch that is supposed to take that craving away.
Basically, there is no cure for pain. There is no cure for grief. There is no cure for heartache. The only thing one can do is put one foot in front of the other and get through it. Getting through it might mean that you take yourself away from those people who love you. It might mean that you self-medicate. You might create a vision for the future based on the singularity. In this vision you give as a gift to yourself a world in which we are all machines and grief no longer exists. Death is no more.
Or it might mean that you don't believe yourself capable of living through the pain and so you do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.
You might even write a book about pain and your process of grief. That book might be a fictional memoir or a memoiresque piece of fiction. In that book you might find a cross hatch of grief and heartache. A smear of regret. A smudge of self-loathing. You might find yourself rewriting your life as you believed it happened: Your sex always ended in orgasm. Or you might tell the truth: you believe you failed your dying father when he needed you most. Ultimately, the love story you might think you're telling--the one about the one who got away--is really about how you raised yourself up from the dead and managed to model yourself after your father--war veteran, witnesser of horrors untold--who kept hoping to witness the cherry blossoms in the trees he planted even though he knew he'd die before spring ever came.
In the end, you can decide to live. Stick that nicotine patch back on. Listen for the bell ringing on the Christmas tree. Watch for the blossoms.
September 18, 2012
Goddammit Currie. You've done it again. I was supposed to get shit done tonight. Not read a couple hundred page book in one siting (on an office chair, a subway, and a recliner). Now I have to contend with having this book in my head. Well done.
March 11, 2013
Well. I read on a friends goodreads page that this was a sad love story, and being one of those kinda emotional self cutters, I stuck it on my "to read" list, as well as my "ASAP!" Shelf. I ordered it on amazon and discovered, to my dismay, that it had not been released yet and I would have to wait a month for it! Damn it!
Finally I got it, aaaand read thru it in about a day. The format was unique; the pages were separated like thoughts. It didn't read straight thru like a normal novel, but rather after every thought, the page would end there and a new page would start. So this made for speedy reading since the amount of actual reading was cut down by 1/3 or so. At first, I thought this would bother me but since it didn't cut into the flow of things, I was not annoyed.
As for the story. I guess I'm a sucker for love stories told from the perspective of a man loving a woman who doesn't love him back with the same kind of fervor. Women are always portrayed as the suckers, the needy ones while men always as the assholes, the players etc. I like a story that flips those stereotypes, and holds the woman responsible for the heartbreak, as was definitely the case in this story.
I think Ron Currie touched on some very real situations and emotions, I would guess that he has experienced a lot of the same kind himself & perhaps even had a woman whom he loved, but was always out of reach. I've always maintained a personal belief that men (and perhaps people in general) want what they can't have, and that the only way to stop wanting something or someONE is to get it. I've experienced this, I've lived it. So to see it written about in the quirky, intelligent way of Currie's was great. I have a feeling that men are fascinated by what is just out of reach, and Currie pinpointed this tendency and dilemma perfectly. An independent woman, fierce and beautiful and just beyond his grasp... What could be better? Or worse?
Currie wrote about this situation beautifully, he was sweet, self destructive, devoted, damaged, intelligent and emotional and IN LOVE--amongst many other things. The distinction between the protagonist of the story and Currie himself is hard to pinpoint, hence my belief he must have actually endured some unrequited love at some point in his life. It's written in first person, and he refers to himself as an author which is kinda funny, since this IS a novel (which by definition makes it fiction). His memories of his father and the period of his life prior to his death are peppered in, occasionally interrupting the story at a point when I didn't want it to be, but I think these little glimpses into Ron Currie's (or character Ron's anyway) emotional and mental state are meant to be indicators of exactly that. His well being-his emotional and mental states. They give the the reader insight into who he was, who he is.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. I didn't love it to death, but I did think it worth reading-it was intelligent, and insightful and like I said before, I'm a sucker for a love story with an independent woman and unhappy ending. It's just so...so... Real.
Finally I got it, aaaand read thru it in about a day. The format was unique; the pages were separated like thoughts. It didn't read straight thru like a normal novel, but rather after every thought, the page would end there and a new page would start. So this made for speedy reading since the amount of actual reading was cut down by 1/3 or so. At first, I thought this would bother me but since it didn't cut into the flow of things, I was not annoyed.
As for the story. I guess I'm a sucker for love stories told from the perspective of a man loving a woman who doesn't love him back with the same kind of fervor. Women are always portrayed as the suckers, the needy ones while men always as the assholes, the players etc. I like a story that flips those stereotypes, and holds the woman responsible for the heartbreak, as was definitely the case in this story.
I think Ron Currie touched on some very real situations and emotions, I would guess that he has experienced a lot of the same kind himself & perhaps even had a woman whom he loved, but was always out of reach. I've always maintained a personal belief that men (and perhaps people in general) want what they can't have, and that the only way to stop wanting something or someONE is to get it. I've experienced this, I've lived it. So to see it written about in the quirky, intelligent way of Currie's was great. I have a feeling that men are fascinated by what is just out of reach, and Currie pinpointed this tendency and dilemma perfectly. An independent woman, fierce and beautiful and just beyond his grasp... What could be better? Or worse?
Currie wrote about this situation beautifully, he was sweet, self destructive, devoted, damaged, intelligent and emotional and IN LOVE--amongst many other things. The distinction between the protagonist of the story and Currie himself is hard to pinpoint, hence my belief he must have actually endured some unrequited love at some point in his life. It's written in first person, and he refers to himself as an author which is kinda funny, since this IS a novel (which by definition makes it fiction). His memories of his father and the period of his life prior to his death are peppered in, occasionally interrupting the story at a point when I didn't want it to be, but I think these little glimpses into Ron Currie's (or character Ron's anyway) emotional and mental state are meant to be indicators of exactly that. His well being-his emotional and mental states. They give the the reader insight into who he was, who he is.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. I didn't love it to death, but I did think it worth reading-it was intelligent, and insightful and like I said before, I'm a sucker for a love story with an independent woman and unhappy ending. It's just so...so... Real.
January 21, 2013
I never know quite how to respond to uber-postmodern novels, with the blurred lines between author and character, the unreliability of the narrators embroiled in identity crises. Despite the fact that I've taken lit theory classes, I never know quite how to describe the stories and structures and whatnot in everyday terms.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is an existential crisis and a troublesome love story wrapped together with musings on truth and Singularity (the concept of machines developing consciousness). The narrator shares the same name as the author and I wonder how much of the story is meant to mirror IRL-Currie's experiences.
The character version of Currie has moved to a Caribbean island while the woman he has loved since childhood sorts out a messy divorce. While he's waiting for Emma to summon him, he reflects on the futility of their relationship and grieves for his recently deceased father. Pushed beyond his cognitive abilities to process anymore bullshit, he decides -- and fails -- to commit suicide. Instead, he allows the outside world to believe he is dead as he disappears to the Middle East, where he roams the desert less in search of redemption or epiphany as numbness.
The characters in this book are largely unsympathetic. They behave selfishly and often impulsively, and it's clear to me that the dysfunctional love story at the center of much of it is less about love than it is about a lack of self-awareness. Given the many musings on consciousness that Currie has folded into the story, I imagine much of that was intentional. It's an interesting contrast, the idea that machines may one day gain consciousness and buck against human conventions such as love and heartbreak set against this narrative of two people who are clearly just not even remotely close to being good for each other not matter how much they want to be together. They are a couple that literally has to engage in violence in order to feel when they are together, and not once throughout this book was I rooting for them.
To pull one sentence out of this book to sum it up:
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is an existential crisis and a troublesome love story wrapped together with musings on truth and Singularity (the concept of machines developing consciousness). The narrator shares the same name as the author and I wonder how much of the story is meant to mirror IRL-Currie's experiences.
The character version of Currie has moved to a Caribbean island while the woman he has loved since childhood sorts out a messy divorce. While he's waiting for Emma to summon him, he reflects on the futility of their relationship and grieves for his recently deceased father. Pushed beyond his cognitive abilities to process anymore bullshit, he decides -- and fails -- to commit suicide. Instead, he allows the outside world to believe he is dead as he disappears to the Middle East, where he roams the desert less in search of redemption or epiphany as numbness.
The characters in this book are largely unsympathetic. They behave selfishly and often impulsively, and it's clear to me that the dysfunctional love story at the center of much of it is less about love than it is about a lack of self-awareness. Given the many musings on consciousness that Currie has folded into the story, I imagine much of that was intentional. It's an interesting contrast, the idea that machines may one day gain consciousness and buck against human conventions such as love and heartbreak set against this narrative of two people who are clearly just not even remotely close to being good for each other not matter how much they want to be together. They are a couple that literally has to engage in violence in order to feel when they are together, and not once throughout this book was I rooting for them.
To pull one sentence out of this book to sum it up:
"A simple equation: time plus grief, multiplied by base human failure."There's a lot of grief and base human failure disguised as self-pity here. And yet, the book is an often lovely musing on many big ideas and I found myself completely engaged by Currie's writing. It reminded me of The Automatic Sweeteheart problem, a paper I had to write in a class I took on the philosophic groundwork of psychology that made me almost violent with frustration (that may have been because Sibicky too much enjoyed playing devil's advocate). If you're the kind of person who doesn't necessarily need a lot of plot movement or likable characters in their novels, if you like thinking about existential questions and deconstructing the lines between reality and fiction, I'm sure this is the book for you.
January 26, 2013
Wow! Talk about breaking the mold. This is the most unconventional book I've ever read. There are no chapters, no “quotations”, and some pages only have one paragraph or one sentence. However, I ended up liking it in spite of all the weirdness. The writer is very passionate and even though it was told in an odd storytelling kind of way, it was grabbing.
The character Ron reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. Ron is a writer, a drunk, and bitter about love. The story jumps around a lot but the one invariable is Ron’s obsession over Emma; his high school sweetheart who came back into his life. Their love relationship is a little “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
At times things are very emotional, especially the stories about Ron’s father dying of cancer. It really broke my heart. Ron’s theories of Singularity were so random it became a comic relief. Ron makes some really bad decisions in life. At one point I was cringing and warning Ron, “Don’t tell her! Don’t do it!” He didn't listen to me; I wanted to smack him in the head. In complete heartbreak Ron decides to end his life.
The last half becomes a fast and intriguing read. Even though the randomness continues jumping around, I no longer noticed. An unusually story, presented in an unusual way, equals entertaining.
If you comment on my blog I'm giving the book away for free by January 31st 2013 at midnight. http://juliemartinwallace.blogspot.co...
The character Ron reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. Ron is a writer, a drunk, and bitter about love. The story jumps around a lot but the one invariable is Ron’s obsession over Emma; his high school sweetheart who came back into his life. Their love relationship is a little “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
At times things are very emotional, especially the stories about Ron’s father dying of cancer. It really broke my heart. Ron’s theories of Singularity were so random it became a comic relief. Ron makes some really bad decisions in life. At one point I was cringing and warning Ron, “Don’t tell her! Don’t do it!” He didn't listen to me; I wanted to smack him in the head. In complete heartbreak Ron decides to end his life.
The last half becomes a fast and intriguing read. Even though the randomness continues jumping around, I no longer noticed. An unusually story, presented in an unusual way, equals entertaining.
If you comment on my blog I'm giving the book away for free by January 31st 2013 at midnight. http://juliemartinwallace.blogspot.co...
January 13, 2013
I really didn't care for this book. I just... did not get it. I also found it kind of.... sexist and not in a way that served the plot in any meaningful way. So many sections just made... no sense. There's ambition here but the overall project isn't realized. It's like, there's this big statement trying to be made.
The writing is fine. There are even some really nice moments but man, I do not understand.
The writing is fine. There are even some really nice moments but man, I do not understand.
March 5, 2013
t’s important that you understand, from the very outset, here, that everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T True. Or at least that I will not deliberately engage in any lies, of either substance or omission, in talking with you here today.
The truth is that just like Huck Finn, who also mostly tries to tell the capital-T Truth, Ron Currie (the character, that is, not the author) is on a journey. Yes, we’re all on a journey, but Ron is on a journey unlike the philosophical or figurative one most of us understand is our life. First to the Caribbean and later to parts unknown, Ron is escaping part of himself and seeking another. The woman he has loved and loves now is beyond his reach. He drinks himself and fights himself into oblivion. His father has died of cancer. It’s the processing of these losses that leaves him breathless while he waxes on about the Singularity, when machines will become sentient, seeming in some instances to welcome it as a way to be free of pain but in others, to stand in awe of the capability of the world we’ve created:
That the machines will see us as a threat requiring elimination seems unlikely to me. My guess is they’ll be fairly benevolent, even indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather. They will have nothing to do with our demise, at least not directly. We will die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die, slowly, of shame.
Odd though these interjections may first appear, they’re actually poignant and apt as Currie slowly reveals himself to the reader. He’s painfully self aware, vacillating between the Singularity to the realism of his life, particularly when it comes to his father:
Or, if you insist on a natty conclusion, how about this one: my father got sick and died and that was it. Nothing followed but silence. No insight or revelation, no evidence of anything beyond that last breath. We paid someone we did not know to transform him from a man full of love and hate and fear into three pounds of ash, which is just about as neat and tidy as it gets, if you like neat and tidy so much.
It has seemed, since then, as though he never existed.
In what is one of the most fascinating and addictive books I’ve read in a while, Currie conjures Ginsberg and Ralph Ellison, writing a novel that is part poetry, part bildungsroman, and all human experience. Though I hesitate to describe Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles as poetry, it is at once poetic and experimental in its reach, and it succeeds without feeling blatantly poetic or experimental. That’s a roundabout way of saying you should read it and not be scared off by its quirks.
The truth is that just like Huck Finn, who also mostly tries to tell the capital-T Truth, Ron Currie (the character, that is, not the author) is on a journey. Yes, we’re all on a journey, but Ron is on a journey unlike the philosophical or figurative one most of us understand is our life. First to the Caribbean and later to parts unknown, Ron is escaping part of himself and seeking another. The woman he has loved and loves now is beyond his reach. He drinks himself and fights himself into oblivion. His father has died of cancer. It’s the processing of these losses that leaves him breathless while he waxes on about the Singularity, when machines will become sentient, seeming in some instances to welcome it as a way to be free of pain but in others, to stand in awe of the capability of the world we’ve created:
That the machines will see us as a threat requiring elimination seems unlikely to me. My guess is they’ll be fairly benevolent, even indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather. They will have nothing to do with our demise, at least not directly. We will die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die, slowly, of shame.
Odd though these interjections may first appear, they’re actually poignant and apt as Currie slowly reveals himself to the reader. He’s painfully self aware, vacillating between the Singularity to the realism of his life, particularly when it comes to his father:
Or, if you insist on a natty conclusion, how about this one: my father got sick and died and that was it. Nothing followed but silence. No insight or revelation, no evidence of anything beyond that last breath. We paid someone we did not know to transform him from a man full of love and hate and fear into three pounds of ash, which is just about as neat and tidy as it gets, if you like neat and tidy so much.
It has seemed, since then, as though he never existed.
In what is one of the most fascinating and addictive books I’ve read in a while, Currie conjures Ginsberg and Ralph Ellison, writing a novel that is part poetry, part bildungsroman, and all human experience. Though I hesitate to describe Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles as poetry, it is at once poetic and experimental in its reach, and it succeeds without feeling blatantly poetic or experimental. That’s a roundabout way of saying you should read it and not be scared off by its quirks.
January 3, 2015
Well, I didn't expect to love this book. When I started reading it, I was expecting something else. I liked Currie’s thoughts on live, love, loss, Singularity but I was still expecting something else. I didn't know what.
And then, I got to the end of the book. And hell, I realized that Currie got to me. That all the things he had said had changed me. And I wasn't sad for how how the book ended. Because the book maybe had ended, like Currie says, but life doesn't end. Life doesn't end, it’s just starts a new paragraph, where everything can happen.
“As I wrote in the final line of my novel, the one that nobody read: ‘...anything, anything, anything is possible.’” And he’s right.
You don’t need to read this book if you don’t want to, but you should read pages 318 through 323, especially 321 through 323.
“...so when you believed this story to be true, it meant a great deal to you. You found it heartfelt and moving and above all honest. It would be fair to say, even, that it changed your life. [...] The story I wrote-the story you feel in love with, the story you believed-is true. It had to be, because otherwise there is no way it could have moved you so.
It is fair to say what this story changed my life. And that’s the most amazing thing a book can do. So, thank you, Ron Currie Jr.
And then, I got to the end of the book. And hell, I realized that Currie got to me. That all the things he had said had changed me. And I wasn't sad for how how the book ended. Because the book maybe had ended, like Currie says, but life doesn't end. Life doesn't end, it’s just starts a new paragraph, where everything can happen.
“As I wrote in the final line of my novel, the one that nobody read: ‘...anything, anything, anything is possible.’” And he’s right.
You don’t need to read this book if you don’t want to, but you should read pages 318 through 323, especially 321 through 323.
“...so when you believed this story to be true, it meant a great deal to you. You found it heartfelt and moving and above all honest. It would be fair to say, even, that it changed your life. [...] The story I wrote-the story you feel in love with, the story you believed-is true. It had to be, because otherwise there is no way it could have moved you so.
It is fair to say what this story changed my life. And that’s the most amazing thing a book can do. So, thank you, Ron Currie Jr.
June 14, 2016
A long time ago, I wrote a detailed review on this book for a site that doesn't seem to exist anymore. So I'm reposting here:
One of the hardest things to do these days is to convince people that what they’re seeing and consuming is actually a real and true thing. Plastic surgery, photoshop, autotune, genetically modified foods, easy access to video editing software, and news organizations that don’t even pretend to report the facts anymore have all fostered a culture in which authenticity is a prized commodity but is almost impossible to claim. Every new technology first promises a chance to better know one another (and ourselves), and then people find ways to use it to obfuscate. Social media gives you the opportunity to present a carefully constructed version of yourself to the world, to only share the photos of you in the perfect lighting, the ones where you look thin and healthy and self-actualized. You edit yourself to look more real.
It’s all a show, and everyone knows it.
So one of the central paradoxes of 21st century American life is that while we’re claiming to be so much more connected than ever before, we’re further alienated than ever. We’re too jaded to celebrate something until we’ve watched fifteen instant replays. We need to see documentation to prove the President is from the same country as us, and then we need to see documentation to prove the documents are real.
These two threads – authenticity and the changing role of technology—overlap and become obsessions for the narrator of Ron Currie Junior’s novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Before you even get to the first sentence—which promises “everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T True”— the book’s mission is made clear. The cover claims it is “a true story” but on the title page the word “true” is asterisked and footnoted. The footnote, four paragraphs long, details Currie’s uneasiness with the term “a true story” and tries to explain how this commonly accepted phrase is more complicated than it sounds, noting: “I’d even venture to suggest that your life, or at least the narrative you have of it in your head, is ‘based on real events,’ rather than objectively true.” It’s an interesting, if oddly defensive, strategy to begin a book by challenging the readers’ notions of reality before they’ve even read the full title. Next, we get a full page of explanation from Currie about his discomfort with using epigraphs because it feels too much like “high-lit posturing” to quote someone like Seneca, for example, when he hasn’t read Seneca, and so “the whole enterprise sort of stinks.” He also takes a moment to beat himself up over the “juvenile metafictional stunt” that he is nonetheless in the process of pulling, which means he is actually briefly engaged in meta-metafiction, until then he does conclude with an epigraph from the movie Rocky, which choice is begging to be read as self-consciously non-literary, an attempt to distance himself from what he views as intellectual vanity.
All of this preliminary stuff may strike you as some light postmodern gimmickry, distracting gamesmanship, and the truth is, if I were reading this review right now, I would have already written off the book as being a little too in love with itself, too much like Dave Eggers at his worst, the kind of writing that is clever but for which I admit I have little patience. The text itself opens with ten uneasy pages marked by hemming and hawing about the nature of truth and other gear-spinning that seems like it’s trying too hard to establish a unique voice rather than tell a story.
But here’s the thing: Currie quickly dispenses with the games and once the story gets itself rolling, it is anything but gimmicky, quickly settling into an intense, testosterone-fueled depiction of a youngish man in the depths of an existential crisis.
Aside from the preliminary materials, this novel is a pretty traditional linear 1st person narrative about a dangerously self-absorbed man who is drinking himself to death because he can’t have the woman he loves. The narrator is named Ron Currie Jr. and he’s a writer, which, yes, is an invitation to draw comparisons between author and narrator, and it’s impossible to tell where one’s personality begins and the other ends. But I don’t particularly care whether any of the narrator’s characteristics are shared with the author, because his primary job is to be an engine to drive the narrative. The voice alternates between fierce machismo and unabashed vulnerability; Ron is essentially an open wound, ugly and festering and daring you not to look away, even as he falls apart.
The reason for his crack-up is simple: he’s in love with Emma, always has been, and Emma doesn’t want to be with him. Emma’s failed marriage still trails her, “like a rusty muffler dragging behind a car” and she needs time alone to sort her self out. He has a book to write—a follow-up to his middling debut novel—and so he decides the best course of action is to exile himself until Emma chooses to come to him. He flies to a Caribbean island, rents a small house, and hits the self-destruct button.
Ron’s life in the Caribbean is hardly glamorous. It’s one cheap drunk after another. It’s bar fights and nights spent on the floor of a windowless prison that even the cockroaches are trying to escape. It’s a group of malevolent caballeros itching to pound him into the dirt as revenge for having injured one of their friends. It’s loneliness and dead space and general misery. Ron is bruised and filthy for most of this time; one gets the sense that he smells terribly. He’s living a grittier version of the familiar Hemingway fantasy: a writer who drinks and fucks and fights except with actual consequences that we see and feel viscerally and relentlessly.
At some point, a college girl on spring break decides to shack up with Ron, and he treats her with cruel indifference, dragging her down into his alcoholic stupor. He condescends to her and loses patience with her efforts to cater to him and hates her for not being Emma. When Emma calls to say she’s going to visit, he kicks the girl out without regret.
Ron would be a difficult person to tolerate over the course of a novel if not for the fact that his worst acts are frequently buffered by unflinchingly honest introspection and an acknowledgment of his own culpability. In discussing an emotional distance he felt the first time he dated Emma, he says,
“But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large?”
A book that wants to investigate issues of authenticity, by necessity, has to have a voice that seems deeply self-aware, and so it serves the book well to allow us to see every ugly detail of Ron’s consciousness. Late in the book, when his life is beginning to turn around, he laments—in a way that seems a mixture of profundity and teenage myopia—that he can’t be sad anymore, says he would give everything up to feel that sadness again, because it feels more real to him to endure the world unhappily than to be blithely content.
Ron’s desperation to feel genuine emotions is often at the root of his problematic behaviors. Nearly everything he does, at least for the first two-thirds of the book, can be read as an attempt to achieve authenticity through the physical: fighting, drinking, sex. The love story with Emma is preoccupied with violent, consensual sex, beginning with the scene when Ron demands that Emma punch him in the face while she climaxes. Later, he writes:
“With Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals… I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood… Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, and we couldn’t leave one another alone.”
Sex with other women is limited in its utility and intimacy for Ron because they’re not free to express themselves as clearly and primally as he and Emma are.
Every time the world becomes too much for him to manage, Ron indulges in his other obsession: The Singularity , which he describes as “the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural)… wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” He has convinced himself that someday, sooner than later, the machines will rise up and assert themselves as the superior race. Confident that The Singularity will not resemble sci-fi horror stories like I, Robot, he believes the machines will be benevolent rulers who will simplify our lives, streamline our relationships, eliminate all the messy emotional baggage from the world. The machines will render humans useless, but will still be “indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather.” He anticipates The Singularity like a Pentecostal does the apocalypse, because although it may lead to the end of humanity as we know it, it will be a salvation from this world with all its uncertainty, dishonesty, and anxiety. The humans may fuse with the machines, but they may also simply “die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die slowly, of shame.” This vision perfectly illustrates the tone of cautious pessimism that permeates this book: the circumstances are bleak, but they’re described with a wry smile and the offer of a slim hope that someday, when the machines take over, they’ll fix everything for us and let us get back to the business of trying to get by.
Not much of true consequence happens while Ron is in the Caribbean, so for all the pleasures of the voice, the narrative does occasionally meander. The book is reinvigorated first when Emma arrives in the Caribbean and then again when she leaves him, to which Ron responds by driving his Jeep off a pier.
The suicide doesn’t take; he washes up on a shore somewhere, but is presumed dead. Authorities searching his island home find a novel manuscript, and through a long chain of good fortune, his story goes viral and his book is soon the biggest literary phenomenon since Harry Potter.
But he doesn’t know any of it. Because he chooses to stay dead and goes into hiding in a lonely outpost on the Sinai Peninsula, working simple jobs and forsaking his past. The voice here changes, loses much of its energy and the verve that drove the book to this point. It makes sense that as Ron finds some measure of inner peace, his life will slow down and be less violent, less wild, but the gritty, bone-on-bone action of his Caribbean exile helped to counterbalance the book’s frequent abstractions and digressions.
Four years later, he finds out that he’s famous. Even in the remotest desert, one cannot outrun celebrity or the internet. And so he reclaims his life. As one might expect, his return enrages those who have fallen in love with the legend of his lovelorn suicide, and so, even though his book was marketed as a novel and even though he had nothing to do with any of it, he finds himself under attack for having defrauded readers. Essentially, he’s playing the role of James Frey, whose fall from grace is best described by David Shields in Reality Hunger:
“In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book… Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief that it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.”
Author and narrator seem to merge at this point, as Ron is called upon to defend his choices and the nature of art itself, questioning this societal desire to have stories be true in some pedantic, fact-checking way as opposed to adhering to an emotional truth. Currie’s argument for the sanctity and value of capital-T Truth is a popular one among literary types these days, but not in the culture at large, as any fiction writer has learned when talking to strangers who “only read real stories.” We live in a culture that claims to value authenticity but that works constantly to subvert it, to redefine it in confusing ways. Scripted reality TV shows, wildly popular yet more artificial than the wildest fictions, perhaps illustrate this duality better than any other medium. The insistence of referring to them as “reality shows” despite all evidence to the contrary is an insult to the nature of reality itself.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is ultimately a compelling reflection on an issue of increasing importance: how does one distinguish between fact and fiction, and is there even a need to distinguish anymore? In a time when something is only as real as we want it to be, how does one establish something fundamental like authenticity?
One of the hardest things to do these days is to convince people that what they’re seeing and consuming is actually a real and true thing. Plastic surgery, photoshop, autotune, genetically modified foods, easy access to video editing software, and news organizations that don’t even pretend to report the facts anymore have all fostered a culture in which authenticity is a prized commodity but is almost impossible to claim. Every new technology first promises a chance to better know one another (and ourselves), and then people find ways to use it to obfuscate. Social media gives you the opportunity to present a carefully constructed version of yourself to the world, to only share the photos of you in the perfect lighting, the ones where you look thin and healthy and self-actualized. You edit yourself to look more real.
It’s all a show, and everyone knows it.
So one of the central paradoxes of 21st century American life is that while we’re claiming to be so much more connected than ever before, we’re further alienated than ever. We’re too jaded to celebrate something until we’ve watched fifteen instant replays. We need to see documentation to prove the President is from the same country as us, and then we need to see documentation to prove the documents are real.
These two threads – authenticity and the changing role of technology—overlap and become obsessions for the narrator of Ron Currie Junior’s novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Before you even get to the first sentence—which promises “everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T True”— the book’s mission is made clear. The cover claims it is “a true story” but on the title page the word “true” is asterisked and footnoted. The footnote, four paragraphs long, details Currie’s uneasiness with the term “a true story” and tries to explain how this commonly accepted phrase is more complicated than it sounds, noting: “I’d even venture to suggest that your life, or at least the narrative you have of it in your head, is ‘based on real events,’ rather than objectively true.” It’s an interesting, if oddly defensive, strategy to begin a book by challenging the readers’ notions of reality before they’ve even read the full title. Next, we get a full page of explanation from Currie about his discomfort with using epigraphs because it feels too much like “high-lit posturing” to quote someone like Seneca, for example, when he hasn’t read Seneca, and so “the whole enterprise sort of stinks.” He also takes a moment to beat himself up over the “juvenile metafictional stunt” that he is nonetheless in the process of pulling, which means he is actually briefly engaged in meta-metafiction, until then he does conclude with an epigraph from the movie Rocky, which choice is begging to be read as self-consciously non-literary, an attempt to distance himself from what he views as intellectual vanity.
All of this preliminary stuff may strike you as some light postmodern gimmickry, distracting gamesmanship, and the truth is, if I were reading this review right now, I would have already written off the book as being a little too in love with itself, too much like Dave Eggers at his worst, the kind of writing that is clever but for which I admit I have little patience. The text itself opens with ten uneasy pages marked by hemming and hawing about the nature of truth and other gear-spinning that seems like it’s trying too hard to establish a unique voice rather than tell a story.
But here’s the thing: Currie quickly dispenses with the games and once the story gets itself rolling, it is anything but gimmicky, quickly settling into an intense, testosterone-fueled depiction of a youngish man in the depths of an existential crisis.
Aside from the preliminary materials, this novel is a pretty traditional linear 1st person narrative about a dangerously self-absorbed man who is drinking himself to death because he can’t have the woman he loves. The narrator is named Ron Currie Jr. and he’s a writer, which, yes, is an invitation to draw comparisons between author and narrator, and it’s impossible to tell where one’s personality begins and the other ends. But I don’t particularly care whether any of the narrator’s characteristics are shared with the author, because his primary job is to be an engine to drive the narrative. The voice alternates between fierce machismo and unabashed vulnerability; Ron is essentially an open wound, ugly and festering and daring you not to look away, even as he falls apart.
The reason for his crack-up is simple: he’s in love with Emma, always has been, and Emma doesn’t want to be with him. Emma’s failed marriage still trails her, “like a rusty muffler dragging behind a car” and she needs time alone to sort her self out. He has a book to write—a follow-up to his middling debut novel—and so he decides the best course of action is to exile himself until Emma chooses to come to him. He flies to a Caribbean island, rents a small house, and hits the self-destruct button.
Ron’s life in the Caribbean is hardly glamorous. It’s one cheap drunk after another. It’s bar fights and nights spent on the floor of a windowless prison that even the cockroaches are trying to escape. It’s a group of malevolent caballeros itching to pound him into the dirt as revenge for having injured one of their friends. It’s loneliness and dead space and general misery. Ron is bruised and filthy for most of this time; one gets the sense that he smells terribly. He’s living a grittier version of the familiar Hemingway fantasy: a writer who drinks and fucks and fights except with actual consequences that we see and feel viscerally and relentlessly.
At some point, a college girl on spring break decides to shack up with Ron, and he treats her with cruel indifference, dragging her down into his alcoholic stupor. He condescends to her and loses patience with her efforts to cater to him and hates her for not being Emma. When Emma calls to say she’s going to visit, he kicks the girl out without regret.
Ron would be a difficult person to tolerate over the course of a novel if not for the fact that his worst acts are frequently buffered by unflinchingly honest introspection and an acknowledgment of his own culpability. In discussing an emotional distance he felt the first time he dated Emma, he says,
“But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large?”
A book that wants to investigate issues of authenticity, by necessity, has to have a voice that seems deeply self-aware, and so it serves the book well to allow us to see every ugly detail of Ron’s consciousness. Late in the book, when his life is beginning to turn around, he laments—in a way that seems a mixture of profundity and teenage myopia—that he can’t be sad anymore, says he would give everything up to feel that sadness again, because it feels more real to him to endure the world unhappily than to be blithely content.
Ron’s desperation to feel genuine emotions is often at the root of his problematic behaviors. Nearly everything he does, at least for the first two-thirds of the book, can be read as an attempt to achieve authenticity through the physical: fighting, drinking, sex. The love story with Emma is preoccupied with violent, consensual sex, beginning with the scene when Ron demands that Emma punch him in the face while she climaxes. Later, he writes:
“With Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals… I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood… Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, and we couldn’t leave one another alone.”
Sex with other women is limited in its utility and intimacy for Ron because they’re not free to express themselves as clearly and primally as he and Emma are.
Every time the world becomes too much for him to manage, Ron indulges in his other obsession: The Singularity , which he describes as “the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural)… wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” He has convinced himself that someday, sooner than later, the machines will rise up and assert themselves as the superior race. Confident that The Singularity will not resemble sci-fi horror stories like I, Robot, he believes the machines will be benevolent rulers who will simplify our lives, streamline our relationships, eliminate all the messy emotional baggage from the world. The machines will render humans useless, but will still be “indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather.” He anticipates The Singularity like a Pentecostal does the apocalypse, because although it may lead to the end of humanity as we know it, it will be a salvation from this world with all its uncertainty, dishonesty, and anxiety. The humans may fuse with the machines, but they may also simply “die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die slowly, of shame.” This vision perfectly illustrates the tone of cautious pessimism that permeates this book: the circumstances are bleak, but they’re described with a wry smile and the offer of a slim hope that someday, when the machines take over, they’ll fix everything for us and let us get back to the business of trying to get by.
Not much of true consequence happens while Ron is in the Caribbean, so for all the pleasures of the voice, the narrative does occasionally meander. The book is reinvigorated first when Emma arrives in the Caribbean and then again when she leaves him, to which Ron responds by driving his Jeep off a pier.
The suicide doesn’t take; he washes up on a shore somewhere, but is presumed dead. Authorities searching his island home find a novel manuscript, and through a long chain of good fortune, his story goes viral and his book is soon the biggest literary phenomenon since Harry Potter.
But he doesn’t know any of it. Because he chooses to stay dead and goes into hiding in a lonely outpost on the Sinai Peninsula, working simple jobs and forsaking his past. The voice here changes, loses much of its energy and the verve that drove the book to this point. It makes sense that as Ron finds some measure of inner peace, his life will slow down and be less violent, less wild, but the gritty, bone-on-bone action of his Caribbean exile helped to counterbalance the book’s frequent abstractions and digressions.
Four years later, he finds out that he’s famous. Even in the remotest desert, one cannot outrun celebrity or the internet. And so he reclaims his life. As one might expect, his return enrages those who have fallen in love with the legend of his lovelorn suicide, and so, even though his book was marketed as a novel and even though he had nothing to do with any of it, he finds himself under attack for having defrauded readers. Essentially, he’s playing the role of James Frey, whose fall from grace is best described by David Shields in Reality Hunger:
“In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book… Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief that it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.”
Author and narrator seem to merge at this point, as Ron is called upon to defend his choices and the nature of art itself, questioning this societal desire to have stories be true in some pedantic, fact-checking way as opposed to adhering to an emotional truth. Currie’s argument for the sanctity and value of capital-T Truth is a popular one among literary types these days, but not in the culture at large, as any fiction writer has learned when talking to strangers who “only read real stories.” We live in a culture that claims to value authenticity but that works constantly to subvert it, to redefine it in confusing ways. Scripted reality TV shows, wildly popular yet more artificial than the wildest fictions, perhaps illustrate this duality better than any other medium. The insistence of referring to them as “reality shows” despite all evidence to the contrary is an insult to the nature of reality itself.
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is ultimately a compelling reflection on an issue of increasing importance: how does one distinguish between fact and fiction, and is there even a need to distinguish anymore? In a time when something is only as real as we want it to be, how does one establish something fundamental like authenticity?
February 5, 2013
It is beginning to look like Ron Currie Jr. may never exhaust his two favorite topics - the death of his father, and his undying love for his childhood sweetheart. Because Flimsy Little Miracles begins by semi-fictionally referencing the author's previous book, I read Everything Matters! first. Though the two books are very different - Everything Matters is quasi-science fiction, and FLPM is quasi-memoir - both books centre around these two obsessions, sometimes to the point of redundancy.
If you like books about self-sabotaging anti-heroes, you will enjoy Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. For my part, I discovered I am quite over that kind of protagonist. Witnessing a man destroy himself through alcohol, fistfights and obsession has lost its appeal for me. The protagonist seeks punishment for himself, which in turn hurts everyone in his blast radius and creates a vicious cycle.
Currie is a thought-provoking writer. This book bounces from narrative about his relationship with Emma (the object of his undying love), flashbacks to the long, slow death of his father (who was, in the protagonist's view, a "real" man that he could never live up to), and discussions on the idea of the Singularity (Google it). Currie's protagonist fixates on the Singularity as both a way to resurrect his father and to spend eternity with Emma. But he also recognizes that disembodied existence may render his love meaningless.
This is a complicated book to sum up. The ending (as well as the protagonist's relationship with Emma) brings up the idea of whether "literal veracity means more to us than deeper truths". Does it really matter if memoirs are factual? If you recall the scandal over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, you may be familiar with this debate. Currie's protagonist finds himself in a similar situation, and halfheartedly tries to explain that veracity has no impact on meaning, and thus the value of a story remains the same whether it's fact or fiction. (An argument I completely agree with, by the way.)
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is a well-written (if somewhat scattered), thought-provoking book with plenty of feeling. Currie's protagonist is self-destructive in the extreme, and often thoroughly frustrating. Sometimes I felt all those slaps he took were well-deserved, because if he'd just manned-up, looked around, and took control of himself, things would have been better for a lot of people. He never quite learns his lesson, and remains self-indulgent, self-absorbed and self-defeating to the end.
My rating of this book falls somewhere between 3 & 4 stars - I really can't make up my mind.
I recieved a free Advanced Uncorrected Proof of Flimsy Little Miracles from Penguin Canada via goodreads First Reads Giveaway. This has in no way influenced my review. Because it was a goodreads promotion, I have left my review on the site. It can also be viewed here: http://bit.ly/Z2jcJp
If you like books about self-sabotaging anti-heroes, you will enjoy Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. For my part, I discovered I am quite over that kind of protagonist. Witnessing a man destroy himself through alcohol, fistfights and obsession has lost its appeal for me. The protagonist seeks punishment for himself, which in turn hurts everyone in his blast radius and creates a vicious cycle.
Currie is a thought-provoking writer. This book bounces from narrative about his relationship with Emma (the object of his undying love), flashbacks to the long, slow death of his father (who was, in the protagonist's view, a "real" man that he could never live up to), and discussions on the idea of the Singularity (Google it). Currie's protagonist fixates on the Singularity as both a way to resurrect his father and to spend eternity with Emma. But he also recognizes that disembodied existence may render his love meaningless.
This is a complicated book to sum up. The ending (as well as the protagonist's relationship with Emma) brings up the idea of whether "literal veracity means more to us than deeper truths". Does it really matter if memoirs are factual? If you recall the scandal over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, you may be familiar with this debate. Currie's protagonist finds himself in a similar situation, and halfheartedly tries to explain that veracity has no impact on meaning, and thus the value of a story remains the same whether it's fact or fiction. (An argument I completely agree with, by the way.)
Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is a well-written (if somewhat scattered), thought-provoking book with plenty of feeling. Currie's protagonist is self-destructive in the extreme, and often thoroughly frustrating. Sometimes I felt all those slaps he took were well-deserved, because if he'd just manned-up, looked around, and took control of himself, things would have been better for a lot of people. He never quite learns his lesson, and remains self-indulgent, self-absorbed and self-defeating to the end.
My rating of this book falls somewhere between 3 & 4 stars - I really can't make up my mind.
I recieved a free Advanced Uncorrected Proof of Flimsy Little Miracles from Penguin Canada via goodreads First Reads Giveaway. This has in no way influenced my review. Because it was a goodreads promotion, I have left my review on the site. It can also be viewed here: http://bit.ly/Z2jcJp
October 6, 2013
Waaaaaaaaaay too self-conscious...
The fictional version the author creates for himself comes across as a big "but seriously for real bro I'm super smart too" dude-bro, the kind of person that Ron Currie Jr. looks like in his dust jacket pictures (bulging biceps, shaved head, Clockwork Orange T-shirt). The shtick with this book is that Currie creates a thinly (?) veiled fictional version of himself to write a work of fiction that revolves around his fictional character fictionalizing himself and being ultimately persecuted by the world at large because of it. Then trying to redeem himself by being all, "but didn't you dummies like the fictional me better?"
I'm not sure if Currie is really that famous of an author for this to be his great big middle finger to the literary world or if he simply imagines himself to be that important that something like this is deserved. He/his character self really just spends most of the book getting drunk (being an alcoholic), fighting the natives on his unnamed Caribbean island, and whining about/propping up his old/forever flame/ex/childhood friend Emma (seriously, though, the whole time you read this book just put Bon Iver's "For Emma, Forever Ago" on repeat and get in the mooooood). Then sometimes he gets all worried about the SINGULARITY and spews some "didja know?" facts about Ray Kurzweil and machines taking over the stock market. THEME: Life is still worth it, even with all the sadness and pain. Woop-de-doo, bro, but you're not Hemingway.
The book does get a little interesting for the final 1/4 when he goes into hiding/accidentally-on-purpose kills himself, before he gets all self-important and masturbatory about defending his fictional self.
I liked his first book better, but have yet to read the middle one.
The fictional version the author creates for himself comes across as a big "but seriously for real bro I'm super smart too" dude-bro, the kind of person that Ron Currie Jr. looks like in his dust jacket pictures (bulging biceps, shaved head, Clockwork Orange T-shirt). The shtick with this book is that Currie creates a thinly (?) veiled fictional version of himself to write a work of fiction that revolves around his fictional character fictionalizing himself and being ultimately persecuted by the world at large because of it. Then trying to redeem himself by being all, "but didn't you dummies like the fictional me better?"
I'm not sure if Currie is really that famous of an author for this to be his great big middle finger to the literary world or if he simply imagines himself to be that important that something like this is deserved. He/his character self really just spends most of the book getting drunk (being an alcoholic), fighting the natives on his unnamed Caribbean island, and whining about/propping up his old/forever flame/ex/childhood friend Emma (seriously, though, the whole time you read this book just put Bon Iver's "For Emma, Forever Ago" on repeat and get in the mooooood). Then sometimes he gets all worried about the SINGULARITY and spews some "didja know?" facts about Ray Kurzweil and machines taking over the stock market. THEME: Life is still worth it, even with all the sadness and pain. Woop-de-doo, bro, but you're not Hemingway.
The book does get a little interesting for the final 1/4 when he goes into hiding/accidentally-on-purpose kills himself, before he gets all self-important and masturbatory about defending his fictional self.
I liked his first book better, but have yet to read the middle one.
March 1, 2013
If you like navel gazing, then have I got the book for you. Our narrator is living on an island (presumably somewhere in the Caribbean), obsessing over the woman he loves. He also talks a bit about his father who died of cancer, the idea of machines becoming sentient, and then more about the woman he loves and their often violent relationship. In between he does a whole hell of a lot of drinking and driving and fighting and moping. And, to be perfectly honest, it's just not all that interesting. The plot doesn't show up until about two thirds of the way through, and even that is disappointing in how little it affects the narrator. He doesn't change in any meaningful way. The sentient machines bit is pointless and apparently unrelated to much of anything; the description of his father's illness is painful and also not clearly related to the story of the woman he loves. Which, given the sheer volume of pages dedicated to her, I would assume is the main point of the story. But I don't know. I do know that there was a whole lot of paper wasted in the printing of this thing, as each "chapter" is extremely short, most well under a single page. Replacing these page breaks with double line breaks would probably cut the page count by more than a third. In short, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would genuinely enjoy this book, but I found it pointless overall, something I would not have finished except for the dwindling hope that eventually the author would have something to say to make it all worth it, a story to tell or even a poignant bit of description. But alas, no.
May 29, 2013
This might be called a "quasi-memoir." Yes, Ron Currie, Jr. is the name of the protagonist. Yes, Ron Currie, Jr.'s father died. Yes, Ron Currie, Jr. believes, to a degree, in the singularity. (All this I know from a book reading where he told us!) But, as Ron Currie, Jr. explained in an interview available at http://gothamist.com/2013/02/12/ron_c..., "at the end of the day, according to most people's standards it is a novel, it's definitely not a memoir."
While the main story line is about Ron and his love of Emma, there are also two backstories - recollections of his time with his father from when his father was told he had cancer and when his father died and his thoughts on the singularity. And, while you might think the backstories are not ones easily tied to the main story line, you will find that they fit quite nicely together.
One thing this book is not is conventional. There are no chapters. Some pages have only one paragraph and rarely does the main story line go on for more than a page or two before there is a jump to one of the back stories. But it does all hang together nicely.
So what about the main story line you may ask makes it worthwhile? For me it was not the times that Ron and Emma were actually together, but what Ron does when they are not - like fake his own suicide and disappear to Egypt for four years. Everything about this story line is just a bit (well, maybe more than a bit) over the top. I guess you could say it is a bit farcical, but only a bit.
While the main story line is about Ron and his love of Emma, there are also two backstories - recollections of his time with his father from when his father was told he had cancer and when his father died and his thoughts on the singularity. And, while you might think the backstories are not ones easily tied to the main story line, you will find that they fit quite nicely together.
One thing this book is not is conventional. There are no chapters. Some pages have only one paragraph and rarely does the main story line go on for more than a page or two before there is a jump to one of the back stories. But it does all hang together nicely.
So what about the main story line you may ask makes it worthwhile? For me it was not the times that Ron and Emma were actually together, but what Ron does when they are not - like fake his own suicide and disappear to Egypt for four years. Everything about this story line is just a bit (well, maybe more than a bit) over the top. I guess you could say it is a bit farcical, but only a bit.
March 29, 2013
What a strange, oddball, hard-to-define, yet lovely little book. I was a tad concerned about where it was going when I started - a writer writing about a writer (himself no less), the unconventional structure - despite the fact that I'm a huge Currie fan (I fell hard for Everything Matters). In a lot of other writer's hands, this would be a meandering disaster of random thoughts, but in Currie's it's something else. What I'm not exactly sure, but it sure as hell is interesting.
Currie-the-character is a writer in a self-destructive relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Emma, woman he seems to love, desire, hate, pull towards him and push away all in equal measure. Sometimes at the same time, in fact. The story of their relationship, and how he fakes his own death, is much of the major concern of the book. Juxtaposed to this tragic love story of sorts is the story of his father's death, and of the time he spent by his father's side. These sections are often incredibly poignant, but not maudlin (and his description of seeing a Disney comedy with his dying father is one for the ages). The third major theme of the novel comes in the form of Currie's thoughts on the singularity, the moment at which machines develop a mind of their own.
In many ways, Currie's asking us to consider what it means to tell the truth and the nature of fiction itself. It can be heady stuff, and it's not perfectly executed, but I'll give it four stars for its sheer audacity.
Currie-the-character is a writer in a self-destructive relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Emma, woman he seems to love, desire, hate, pull towards him and push away all in equal measure. Sometimes at the same time, in fact. The story of their relationship, and how he fakes his own death, is much of the major concern of the book. Juxtaposed to this tragic love story of sorts is the story of his father's death, and of the time he spent by his father's side. These sections are often incredibly poignant, but not maudlin (and his description of seeing a Disney comedy with his dying father is one for the ages). The third major theme of the novel comes in the form of Currie's thoughts on the singularity, the moment at which machines develop a mind of their own.
In many ways, Currie's asking us to consider what it means to tell the truth and the nature of fiction itself. It can be heady stuff, and it's not perfectly executed, but I'll give it four stars for its sheer audacity.
February 3, 2025
Ron Currie Jr. has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut elsewhere, and I suppose that Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is his most Vonnegut-ish book. I didn't enjoy it as much as Everything Matters, but I did like it better than God Is Dead.
The protagonist, who is also named Ron Currie Jr, is in love with a woman named Emma. In fact, that might be understating his feelings for her. He actually seems obsessed with her. They have an on-again, off-again romance over the course of the years.
He also spends a lot of time getting drunk on a Caribbean island and getting into fights. He has affairs with other women to try to forget about Emma. And he spends a considerable amount of the novel contemplating the Singularity and what it's going to mean to his love life and the love lives of everyone around him.
It's beautifully written, and I related to Currie's attitudes and thoughts in more instances than I'm entirely comfortable with. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is one of my favorite books I've read this year, although I read it immediately after re-reading Everything Matters, which affected me more on every level.
The protagonist, who is also named Ron Currie Jr, is in love with a woman named Emma. In fact, that might be understating his feelings for her. He actually seems obsessed with her. They have an on-again, off-again romance over the course of the years.
He also spends a lot of time getting drunk on a Caribbean island and getting into fights. He has affairs with other women to try to forget about Emma. And he spends a considerable amount of the novel contemplating the Singularity and what it's going to mean to his love life and the love lives of everyone around him.
It's beautifully written, and I related to Currie's attitudes and thoughts in more instances than I'm entirely comfortable with. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is one of my favorite books I've read this year, although I read it immediately after re-reading Everything Matters, which affected me more on every level.
September 28, 2015
Terrible, Terrible, Terrible book. Goodness, I feel like I wasted hours of my life by reading this book. It was NOT uplifting, but extremely pessimistic. It was derogatory. It was profane. It was an absolute piece of crap in my opinion. I hate giving bad reviews when I won the book from a good-reads giveaway - but I honestly can not think of even one decent thing to write about in this review. I felt like all the characters were worthless bums and in addition to being low-life's they were boring and had NO character whatsoever. It was almost painful to continue reading to see what would happen next.
I don't know if this book was terribly written, or if the author suffers from severe depression but I just can't see why this book is out on shelves. The title is dumb. The characters are atrocious. The plot is ridiculous (wait - is there even a substantial plot? I don't think so!). Ugh... let's move on and find something better to spend our time than reading or writing about this book. The end.
I don't know if this book was terribly written, or if the author suffers from severe depression but I just can't see why this book is out on shelves. The title is dumb. The characters are atrocious. The plot is ridiculous (wait - is there even a substantial plot? I don't think so!). Ugh... let's move on and find something better to spend our time than reading or writing about this book. The end.
March 4, 2013
This book succeeds for its unapologetic honesty and its refusal to conform to narrative standards. Ron recalls the events of his life not in a linear plot, but in short bursts, from his father’s death, to his relationship with Emma, his brawling and boozing, his fake suicide, his exile, and his return. And the Singularity. Ron is particularly fixated on this topic. The book as a whole is excellent, self-deprecating, masochistic, funny, and raw. I adored the manner in which Ron chose to tell this story, and could even forgive him for not using quotation marks for dialogue. He doesn’t take himself too seriously even when his thoughts take a serious turn, but that’s usually because he’s drunk. Even the title is awesome (nicotine patch). I think the novel is highly original and now I really want to hang out with Ron and do some major drinking.
I won a copy of this book from a blog giveaway.
I won a copy of this book from a blog giveaway.
January 24, 2013
A father's messy death, the Singularity, a perfect, violent love, and capital-T Truth. Why is it that a book that makes me think so hard and feel so much is impossible to describe? Ron Currie manages to accomplish things on the page (gymnastic feats of logic, associative speculation, alienation, abject confession, contrition, enduring love, aching loss) that I can only manage in my mind--and sometimes not even there. The best thing about Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is that the author takes you along with him on his wild flights of the mind, but always comes back to his comforting touchstones whenever he gets too close to the sun. Reading Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles not only makes makes you feel smarter...it, quite beautifully, makes you FEEL.
June 27, 2016
This was one of those random, unexpected, brilliant reads I just love!! For instance, the format - the pages separated like thoughts, the whole story like a flowing stream of consciousness. He writes this account as he is self-exiled to an island, where he is either in touch with his feelings, grieving the death of his father, his reoccurring loss of the woman he loves, or obliterates them with drink and the escaping life in general, after the novel he had been writing was lost in a fire. Instead of the book he was writing, he creates this… sort of a fictional memoir, something that challenges the reader to think about the truth in fiction, in the book, and in the larger scope of our lives.
August 13, 2017
This was a story about a man who really didn't do anything but complain and hide from his life. I kept waiting for something to happen, but it never did. The one moment something exciting happened, the MC just ran away, disappeared and did nothing but complain again.
There was an entire part of the story scattered throughout the book that never got used. He kept talking about what would happen if the machines took over the world, but then never used that information. I think he was trying to use it to describe humanity and society, but it really didn't make sense for the rest of the story.
The writing was good. I actually read through the entire book which says something for Mr Currie's Skill. I read more because I thought something was going to happen. Oh Well.
There was an entire part of the story scattered throughout the book that never got used. He kept talking about what would happen if the machines took over the world, but then never used that information. I think he was trying to use it to describe humanity and society, but it really didn't make sense for the rest of the story.
The writing was good. I actually read through the entire book which says something for Mr Currie's Skill. I read more because I thought something was going to happen. Oh Well.
January 28, 2013
Here is a post modern novel after my own heart.
Though this is not a memoir but rather a work of fiction it doesn’t mean that the feelings and thoughts are not real….that was one of the things Currie explicitly points out to readers and one of the reasons I loved the novel….just because something isn’t the “truth” doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
This novel is begging to be deconstructed and analyzed. It’s hard for me to describe in normal terms how rich this novel is and why….it just simply is.
See my full review here
Though this is not a memoir but rather a work of fiction it doesn’t mean that the feelings and thoughts are not real….that was one of the things Currie explicitly points out to readers and one of the reasons I loved the novel….just because something isn’t the “truth” doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
This novel is begging to be deconstructed and analyzed. It’s hard for me to describe in normal terms how rich this novel is and why….it just simply is.
See my full review here
March 17, 2013
Ron Currie's strong and distinctive voice, along with his customary elegant storytelling, carry his protagonist (also named Ron Currie) through a landscape of loss and longing. I'm always an easy mark for Currie's father-son stuff, but the difficult and sad relationship between the character Ron and his lifelong love Emma is also fine.
May 17, 2013
Quickly read, quickly forgotten.
I wonder if he records his little obsessive rants and then goes back and polishes the dictation. That was a recurring thought while reading... wondering about his writing process. And I kept wishing that he'd write about someone else besides himself.
I wonder if he records his little obsessive rants and then goes back and polishes the dictation. That was a recurring thought while reading... wondering about his writing process. And I kept wishing that he'd write about someone else besides himself.
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