Tom Lynch

The Midwest is unlike any other place.

Adrienne Miller, the Midwest-raised literary editor at Esquire magazine, offers her debut novel, "The Coast of Akron," a comedic examination of the Havens--an afflicted, artistic family of dysfunction. They are not unlike Salinger's Glass family, or Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson's more updated Tenenbaums--but the biggest difference is the setting. While the others were wealthy East Coast, the Havens are very much Ohio--Akron to be exact--which happens to be the state where Miller was born.

"I didn't want a thinly veiled autobiography," Miller says of picking the location. Early drafts set the story in Portugal. "Why, I don't know, I've never been there, but it seemed like I can invent a place--it seemed foggy and romantic. But the characters weren't working. Once I made [Lowell, the family's patriarch] a Midwesterner, I understood him, and they all took a big field trip to Akron. I hate to admit it, it embarrasses me, but this book is about Akron. If I still lived there, I wouldn't write about it. I think you have to be fairly removed from a place in order to reinvent it and describe it."

The literary editor of Esquire since 1997, Miller has worked with heavyweights like Don DeLillo and George Saunders, and no doubt has added pressure put upon her to succeed as a novelist. "I sheepishly told people I have a book. I kept it really quiet," she says of "Akron," which she wrote during her nights away from her day job. It took her five years. "I don't have a larger cynical view, how people in New York might resent somebody who is a professional editor. I feel like a lot of reviews have been nice, but I feel the bar is much higher...I'm not given a lot of latitude. I'm not feeling sorry for myself or anything, but I do find that I'm being scrutinized much more closely than other debut novelists."

Miller still adores the heartland. "For me, I'm still spiritually imbedded in the Midwest, I'm still there. It's a very odd, mysterious place. A lot of the weirdest, artistic people I've met were in Ohio, not in New York or L.A. New York is too rigid and expensive. True weirdo artists can't be here."

Adrienne Miller reads from "The Coast of Akron" on May 23 at Women and Children First Bookstore, 5233 North Clark, (773)769-9299, at 7:30pm. Free.

(2005-05-17)

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