Inventing the Abbotts

Inventing the Abbotts and other stories. Sue Miller. London: Indigo Press, 1997. 180 pages, php248, Books for Less.

What attracted me to this book was that I knew there was a film version, and I'm almost always interested to see how the transition was made from book to film. Even more attractive was the notion that the stories which comprise the book were all interlocking tales about the brothers Doug and John and the Abbott sisters. That's why I got it, given the hefty price for such a slim volume. At the time, I think I just finished reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which was properly billed as a novel. But each chapter could be taken as a stand alone story. So when I saw Inventing the Abbotts (Book # 14), I had this impression that it was like Alvarez's novel. I was mistaken.

The title story drew me in quite deep. Small town, wealthy Abbott family with three pretty sisters and never ending society parties; two brothers and their mother who was widowed young, and their rather reduced circumstances. The older brother John was deeply obssessed with the girls of the Abbott family and had a relationship with each of them, one after the other. It was a rather interesting dynamic, John and the sisters. With each breakup, the pain becomes greater, and it becomes even more obvious that he will never be anything other than "the boy from the other side of the tracks." But John needed them to fill in something that his own background could never give him. The younger brother functions mostly as the narrator. Although in the film as he played by Joaquin Phoenix, the role was beefed up--perhaps precisely because it was Joaquin Phoenix.

The next ten stories were variations of a theme--everyone seemed miserable, on the edge of heartbreak, separation, or about to be abused. The parents in Sue Miller's stories always try to protect their kids from pain, but then realize that they could try but could never insulate their kids from the harshness of the world. Things would never be the same. But however bleak the world is in these stories, they still couldn't hold a candle to the title story.

"Inventing the Abbotts," all 32 pages of it, had this intensity that would have been diffused had it been a novel. I'm tempted to say that the story more than makes up for the rest of the book, as everything else that followed never matched it. Somehow her short fiction never quite captures what I want to see in that form. So part of me wants to believe that maybe Sue Miller works better with longer stories and that I actually paid the cover price for that one story.