Personal Velocity by Rebecca Miller 178pp, Doubleday, £10.99
Rebecca (daughter of Arthur) Miller is already a triple award-winner, but that was for a film, Angela. Now she is amusing herself by writing short stories, but still her cinematic talent comes shining through - emotionally and intellectually, every tale in this debut volume is a quick fix, a burst of clarity delivered at breakneck speed: perfect stuff for a visually oriented, easily distracted generation.
Her language, described as "spare" by enthusiastic reviewers (Miller's book is already out in the US), isn't the blank and sterile prose adopted by so many "sparing" authors. She doesn't waste words, but this is not because she hasn't got enough of them in her head in the first place: it is because she always has the precisely accurate phrase to hand. The seven portraits that make up Personal Velocity are detailed and incisive; her leading characters - all very different women - are hard, intense and self-contained.
Successful Greta is flying high, so far above her unambitious husband that abruptly, shamefully, without prior warning, she crashes out of love. Once-strong Delia reclaims her power: she abandons her violent relationship, renounces enfeebling emotions and remembers her old trick of reducing men to putty by working them in sluttish hands.
Louisa's love life is ruinous because she imagines she is seeking a perfect lover when in fact she is obsessively trawling the world for her twin brother, who died at birth. Julianne is a mediocre poet married to a famous writer; she resorts to finding happiness in little things. Byrna, her cleaner, is also dragging the unpacked luggage of failed ambition, and envies Julianne because she has it all.
Nancy is a little girl whose neglectful, self-obsessed parents think that having her monitored by a cut-rate shrink is the equivalent of caring for her. She's going to turn into something dangerous. Paula is trying to read the signs - why was the man beside her killed by the speeding car instead of her? Whose life has she got to save in return? She focuses on a mistreated homeless boy, while still planning an abortion.
Though much of her writing starts out sad and tough, the twists at the end of Miller's stories lift them way out of the realm of victim drama. Her kiss-off lines propel us back to hopeful futures, and although each resolution is unexpected, they all immediately make sense - her characters are so consistent that you couldn't, when you come to think about it, imagine them acting any other way.
This is an excellent book; a future award-winner, if the gods are just. But lest this review get too laudatory, let me make a complaint - too many of the names Miller uses end in "a". There. Take that, Rebecca.
