Summary

It seems like a sign of liberation—of adulthood’s indefinite postponement—when partisans bomb the university and every student’s personal records, from transcripts to debts, are consumed in erasing fire. If nothing else, it lends Margaux the freedom to continue her preferred art form of list-making unfettered by the authority of academia—until she encounters the breakdowns and disappearances and deaths of the people she admires and cherishes most. A monochromatic painter. A BDSM documentary photographer. A transgendered Aphrodite. A mathematician with an invisible cat. Yet as the concrete details of her world dissolve into the abstraction of loss, they also become more rarefied, more essential. Something small enough to be contained. Small enough to be protected.

Set in a semi-fictional, post-industrial American warzone, this novel explores multiple facets related to the recent nonfictional decades of constant civil unrest, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of holding a personal creative life amid a time of constant violence and change. Despite its heavy themes, the narrative is threaded throughout with veins of absurdist humor that invite and welcome us into the familial warmth of the narrator’s memories of friendship. 

Contents

Center
Periphery
Plane
Insideness
Outsideness
Containment

Acknowledgments

Author

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of two previous novels—To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice—the collection Blue of the World, and the family history Any Less You. A founding member of the post-jazz chamber septet The Plaster Cramp, Milliken lives in Saco, Maine.

Reviews

"Fascinating, strange, and buoyed by a narrative voice that is both somehow floating above the action yet thoroughly grounded in detail . . . there are moments of absolute poetry." 
—Meghan Gilliss, author of Lungfish

"Milliken asks the reader to exist in an enclosure of his own creation and adroitly shifts our innards through steady, spiraling accretion, until, with quiet elegance, he bares the truth of our own situation that he’s primed us for." 
—Mark Powell, author of Lioness