Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

First off, how much does this book cover remind you of the Back-Blogged backdrop? Ah? Ah?

Ron Currie is an author I've gone over more than once here already, most recently just earlier this month with God Is Dead. This is his third and latest book, published a few years ago. On its surface, it's the story of an author who fakes his death and then watches his unfinished novel get published and become the best-selling book since Harry Potter. But that's not really what the bulk of Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is concerned with. The narrator also recounts his father's brutal battle with cancer and his own tragic on-and-off love story with the girl of his dreams. He also consistently brings up the idea of the "Singularity" - the not-so-distant future moment when we'll all merge our minds with machines and, in addition to being able to live forever, we'll never feel pain or discomfort again.

It's part narrative, part memoir, part speculative fiction - and the real kicker is that it's metafictional in nature. The main character in the book is named Ron Currie and he's an author from Maine; the real author Ron Currie, writing the book, lost his father to a battle with cancer. Right up front, the character-narrator Currie promises the reader that everything he's about to say is one hundred percent true, without any embellishments - which of course runs up against the idea that this very person is fictional.

There's a lot going on in Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, but it never gets absurd or hard to follow and the various threads of the story don't ever end up getting pulled through the fourth wall; the fictional nature of the book and of the character Ron Currie are never pointed out or even hinted at within the book itself - they're just kind of there on the margins as an inside joke for the reader to consider when the narrator Ron Currie says things like, "again, this is one hundred percent true," or bemoans that his publishers would rather see him write "memoirs" than "fiction."

Currie has earned several comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut so far in his career, and although he's separate and distinct as has a voice of his own - far less silly, in general - I think "modern day Vonnegut" is a fair and apt description. Even the way this story unfolds - meandering, out of order, more concerned with people and emotions than events and interactions - feels very, you know, Vonnegut-like.

My one complaint - and it's really more of a concern than a complaint - is Currie's focus on his father's cancer and demise. He writes beautifully and succinctly about his father's final months and days, and this is obviously something that has affected him profoundly. But he already tackled the same subject with expertise in Everything Matters! to an extent where I thought there was little else to say. I mean, by all means, Currie's got plenty to say about what happened, and he's great at saying it. I just hope that he's got several more books to come, and I wonder how many of them can feature "father dying of cancer" as a story arc.

At any rate, this was another very enjoyable read from one of my favorite contemporary authors. Check this guy out, y'all. I know the rest of you like Vonnegut too.