The latest collection from Miller (The Nature of Longing
) skillfully explores the tension in Midwestern race and class relations. “Getting to Know the World,†for example, follows the bigotry directed toward a black family ensconced for generations within an Ohio farming community: by 1970, they're one of the only black families “brave enough or crazy enough†to still be around. “Hawaii†imagines a fatherless black boy's torment when his mother—rejecting any ties with her former husband, Samson, now living in Hawaii—remarries a white man hostile to the boy's acute sense of loss. The clash between a cautious Midwestern parsimoniousness and fast-paced yuppie recklessness becomes apparent in the opening story, “Ice,†in which a sleek, affluent daughter living in San Francisco visits her Depression-era parents for Christmas: the presents they exchange painfully underscore the emotional gaps between them. Miller can also be playful and self-consciously literary, as in fleshing out the lonely life of a Chekhov character betrayed by her husband in “Dimitry Gurov's Dowdy Wife.†Miller's tales impart a real breadth of experience. (Jan.)
