Adrienne Miller: The Coast of Akron

Thanks to the 2004 presidential election, Ohio is no longer merely a state, but "the heartland", a term which conjures up soccer moms and "values voters": people who spent time in focus groups unloading their homespun wisdom on the rest of America.

You won't find much of this place in Adrienne Miller's clever debut novel, The Coast of Akron. Unfolding over several decades and across blurred gender lines, the novel introduces a refreshingly maladapted American family — from Ohio. To paraphrase Philip Larkin, eccentricity trickles downward, and the source of that tributary here is paterfamilias Lowell Haven.

With his daytime TV good looks and important hair, Lowell filches intelligence from those around him and tosses it off as his own. We learn about this endearing character trait from the diary entries of his ex-wife, Jenny, who Lowell met long ago in England, married, and bore a child with, before hustling off with her talent in painting.

Fast forward a few years and Jenny is choking on Lowell's exhaust. While she lies in bed bemoaning her fate, he, like Matthew Barney today, has become a rich and famous artist by spinning forth an inscrutable mythology. While Barney's Cremaster Cycle of films used surrealism to smuggle gibberish into the Guggenheim, Lowell relies upon a kind of ventriloquism to keep his fans hungering for more.

Miller seems to be making a subtle jab at the monomania of what stands for art these days. As a farce, the book could not be more bizarre, or more dead-on target. The Tudor mansion Lowell occupies with his lover Fergus, for instance, is papered with a series of canvases depicting Lowell in various historical garb as Henry VIII, as the Wife of Bath, and so on. That Lowell didn't paint them is almost beside the point.

Fame, Miller suggests, is the cruelest of currencies: like wealth, it debases those who hunger for it while those who possess it remain almost oblivious to its power. Thanks to this cosy dynamic, Lowell can be a monster and yet be treated like a saint. As the book continues, Fergus works himself into a lather of jealousy while Lowell brazenly lassoes himself another acolyte, this time a woman who is dressed, Fergus blithely observes, like an Eastern European prostitute.

Lowell seems to feel her seduction is a performance, an act of generosity.

Although Fergus is almost too sozzled and pathetic to elicit sympathy laughs, on the other hand, the one character who does tug at the heartstrings is Lowell's daughter, Merit, who spends as much time repairing her falling-down mother as she does the Jaguar which Fergus and Lowell gave her for her 21st birthday.

As you might gather at this point, the whole Haven clan is tumbling swiftly down the coast of Akron, even though, as one character aptly points out, there is no coastline in this part of the state. But as a metaphor, it works. They're a mess. Merit bumbles into a needy affair with a braces-wearing office schlub, Lowell pushes his lover to the brink of a meltdown, and Jenny has devoted her life to serving a genius who really isn't one. Put your ear close to the book and you can almost hear the scree beginning to crumble. A tremendously lively debut novel.

Hutchison $36.95

* John Freeman is a New York writer.