Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

In her review of Everything Matters!, the 2009 novel by Ron Currie, Jr., Janet Maslin of the New York Times called Currie a “startlingly talented” author whose fiction will “pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions.” Maslin continued, “The excitement that drives the reader from page to page…is about seeing what Mr. Currie will try next.” In Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles the inventive Currie returns with an absorbing and provocative story that asks, among other things, why people so desperately crave factual truth in their entertainments.

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is told from the point of the view of a writer—one who in many ways resembles the real Ron Currie, Jr.—who has retreated to a tropical island after a series of devastating incidents: the death of his father, the destruction of his latest manuscript in a fire, and the disintegration of his relationship with a woman, Emma, whom he has loved since childhood. Rather than finding solace and inspiration in paradise, he descends into a miasma of alcohol, careless destruction, and casual comfort with a spring-breaking co-ed. A botched suicide attempt transforms into a successful fake suicide, providing him the opportunity to flee, and he leaves a new manuscript, mostly about Emma, behind. As it turns out, nothing guarantees literary success like the posthumous discovery of a love story, especially one in which readers can discern their own desire and heartbreak. However, the sudden reappearance of the author quickly shatters the good will his death engendered, and he discovers that above all the world seeks truth, even in fiction.

In darkly funny, deeply moving prose, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles marks a gifted voice breaking new ground as Currie interrogates the concepts of “truth” and “honesty” and “reality,” further unsettling the ever-more-indistinct boundary between fiction and autobiography. This is an urgent, unforgettable novel that makes our natural urge to know the truth a source of provocation. As Currie says in his epigraph to the book, “if you, like me, get goose bumps whenever you encounter those magic words [‘based on real events’] I encourage you to keep turning the pages, because I promise, on my father’s grave, that that is exactly the kind of story you will find in this book.”

Ron Currie, Jr. is the winner of the 2009 Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the New York Public Library Young Lions Award for his acclaimed debut, God is Dead. His 2009 novel, Everything Matters!, was an Indie Next Pick and one of Amazon’s 100 top books of 2009, and was named by the Los Angeles Times as among the Best Fiction of 2009. He lives in Waterville, Maine.

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