Rebecca Miller: Personal Velocity

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

The title of Rebecca Miller's debut book of short stories, Personal Velocity, is an apt descriptor of the driving force behind the vastly different circumstances of its American women characters' lives.

Both matter-of-fact, and yet tender and subtle, each of these seven narratives seems impelled on a trajectory that has as its central force a moment of awakening.

Greta looks down at her husband's shoes one morning and in their earnest simplicity discovers she will leave him; Delia summons her not inconsiderable strength to leave an abusive husband, but then finds she's been fuelled by their battling.

Paula picks up a damaged young runaway, while running from her recently discovered pregnancy, and ignites a latent nurturing; Bryna confronts her dominating mother-in-law and gains a reprieve from the stifling prison her life has become.

In the fragility of her neighbouring servant's existence, Julianne comes to terms with the tenuousness of her own.

Louisa's imminent success as a painter forces her to confront the source of her promiscuity.

And precocious little Nancy, hemmed in by successful but dysfunctional parents, tests what powers she has in what looks set to become a future pattern.

Stated like that, each of these tales sounds seemingly straightforward, prosaic, almost as does the style of Miller's writing.

But there is nothing simple about either their emotional lives or the irony and complexity with which she reveals them.

Knowing the author is a cinematographer, whose feature film Angela won the Filmmakers Trophy and Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival, makes it difficult not to see a filmmaker's sensibility in the way she plays her stories scene by scene.

There is not much fat here, language is used sparingly but graphically, and her sense of pace never falters.

She also has a wonderful ear for dialogue, both internal and external, along with an awareness of how we deal with pain.



Her good-humoured acceptance of her protagonists' diverse flaws allows us to appreciate the strength that's taken them to this particular point in their lives, and which no doubt will carry them into the future, compromises and all.

Black Swan

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* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland public relations consultant and writer.