Is there a writer more profound and less pretentious than Lydia Millet? In her novels and story collections, a dozen in all, Millet deals out existential questions like playing cards, and like any good casino dealer, her hands never shake. Her newest book, Fight No More, could easily be her most philosophically confident and complex work yet ... Even by her own high standard, Millet is exceptional in these moments of possibility. She writes them with equal parts wildness and straightforwardness, certainty and the certainty of impermanence.
Lydia Millet’s new book Fight No More is a curious thing: a collection of linked stories with the genuine thrust of a novel that doesn't decalre itself as such ... The impression the book leaves is that Millet began with the notion of a panorama, a menagerie, or a hub with several spokes, until a set of characters took over her imagination ... In Fight No More the mix of bone and tissue makes for a living thing ... You have the sense that Millet could easily bury us in her smartness but has instead cleaved to the characters she’s created and made her humor generously broad. These are accessible fictions.
Each new story swerves like a breathtaking drive through LA, logical yet surprising ... Fight No More takes the connected story model to a pure and higher form, creating a satisfying web that expands one character, one ZIP code, one housing situation at a time, to 13 tales that are each distinct and whole but form something daring in their entirety.
In showing how the rich rely on 'lazy' people to do the labor that makes their lives, particularly at home, possible, Millet hones in on an audacious and laughable incongruity ... The collection is linked through characters that reappear (as relatives, friends, lovers) as the book progresses, showing the ways in which we are living in simultaneous dimensions of pain, betrayal and forgetting. Yet as bleak as their situations may get, there remains a thread of dark humor.
...the canny and daring writer Lydia Millet is no sentimentalist, and in Fight No More, her new collection of linked stories, she explores the fragility and treachery of a place that can offer both solace and deception ... Millet’s boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns ... Millet provides her characters with the desire to understand the fractures in their lives in a larger context ... shimmering and brilliantly engaged.
...a book of adeptly interlocked tales ... As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile.
Millet, choosing present-day Los Angeles for her tightly woven trove of adults and teenagers slowly losing and finding their minds, breathes more life and texture into life into sun-baked Southern California than anything since Robert Altman’s Short Cuts ... [Millet is] aware, however, of the richness embodied by each of [her] characters, and if you do grab a pen, as I did, and map out how and where the people in [her] stories overlap, you’ll be rewarded ... Millet has a knack for two specific, brilliant devices. First, infusing her prose with the part-confident, part-bored, part-ironic intonation of upper middle-class conversation in Los Angeles ... Second, trading from the beginning on the necessary maintenance of fact as fiction. 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s' might be one of the best short stories I’ve read in the last 10 years. Millet dances between first and second person in the story, an interesting effort ... Very rarely in modern American literature is the reader afforded an opportunity to so fully absorb a character that it feels like he’s sitting right next to you.
This unstated and unexpected intimacy, created in her work, is what ties together the 12 related stories in Lydia Millet’s new short story collection. Like much of Millet’s previous work, Fight No More is thoughtful, sharply intelligent, strange and funny, yet at turns dark and even frightening ... Fight No More starts out good and by the end is totally fantastic ... Millet’s storytelling is amazing, from her pacing to her plotting to her original style and phrasing. This is a riveting collection.
This sense of the bizarre and frequently surreal pervades the entire book ... Unlike many books, the strangeness consistent throughout Fight No More also seeps into the reader. I felt slightly off-kilter while reading, as though the dream-like air, smothering heat, and irrationalities of orderly suburban L.A. (where the collection is set) were warping the stories into mirages ... What grounds these works of fiction and gives them momentum is the diverse cast of recurring characters ... Millet allows her characters their small neuroses and gives permission for their thoughts to meander ... because her characters are so distinct, almost startling in their richness, Millet is able to explore such grand questions organically and humorously, all while not taking life too seriously.
...[a] masterful collection ... The undercurrent of friction that results lends a quiet force to stories that explore the challenges of communication and the meaning of home ... in a phenomenal feat of plot-spinning, Millet links the lives of this disparate group of characters ... richly realized stories.
Here, her attack is more compassionate and realistic, but she can still bring the weird ... Those stories are especially strong because Millet so readily shifts point of view—by turns she can be a snotty rich kid, a pedophile, and a lower-class cam girl striving to rise above her station ... A linked-story collection done right, with sensitive and complex characters each looking for a place to call home.
...irresistible ... Millet’s emphasis is on the inner lives of her characters ... The aggregate effect makes this collection a sprawling, tender portrait of modern adults quietly trapped by their youthful aspirations.
