PrintI didn’t consider running away from home until halfway through the third grade, when my mother bought me E.L. Konigsberg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
It had nothing to do with her—I grew up in a stable, middle-class home—and everything to do with the story. Two kids flee their similarly domestic New York apartment in search of adventure, My Side of the Mountain-style. Instead of heading upstate, they end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have enough money to subsist for most of the novel and to book a ticket to Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s Connecticut chateau at the plot’s end, where, having learned something about themselves and about the world, they are promptly returned by means of Rolls Royce to a probable future of school, privilege, and Yale Law (though the possibility of none of these crossed my mind when I finished the last page, exhilarated and transported).
It’s a tale that easily lends itself to novelization. Whatever plot there is holds more adventure than drama—the world is as fresh and stimulating, as filled with arcane wonders, exotic companions, and self-discovery as it was for the old-school colonial novelists. This lively middle, which only sometimes dips into the depths of melodrama, is framed by a beginning and an end that illuminate even the darkest moments with the warm, welcoming womb of the mother’s country, of the apartment with mom, dad, and siblings.
In Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, running away is a mild caprice, the sort of travel that is both fun and broadening and that must necessarily resolve into repatriation. In Nami Mun’s new novel, Miles From Nowhere, it is an act of violent and inevitable rebellion for its protagonist, Joon, leading to a state of misery that is often acute in its magnitude, unremitting in its presence, and indefinite in its duration. The locations of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler are home, Fifth Avenue, Farmington, and home. Miles From Nowhere is set in the Bronx. Its locations are derelict apartments, bars, and the streets—home has already been abandoned by the beginning of the first chapter, “Shelter.”
The cold open works fairly well, but then home intrudes two pages later: “My mom turned crazy the night father left us for good.” It takes a while to figure out that the novel is being narrated not by Joon as she ages—at the beginning, she’s a tween, like Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s heroine—but by a much older Joon sometime after she turns 18, visits an employment agency, and the events of the novel conclude.
Joon’s voice, if a little shell-shocked, later grows strong and confident. When I talk to Mun, who has undergone many of the same experiences, her timbre is similar. Nevertheless, she’s quick to play down the autobiographical aspect. “My personal life is very different from the book,” she says. “The timeline is very different. I did leave home when I was 13 for good—Joon is Korean-American, I’m Korean-American. Some of the feelings that I felt as a runaway are definitely expressed in the book, but through a narrative artifice.”
What sort of artifice? Having Joon tell the story in a series of flashbacks is a common but promising idea that mirrors Mun’s own creative idiom. She describes to me the laborious process of finding a “seed,” then reconstructing an entire universe from this moment. Miles From Nowhere is the product of eight years’ work for its author and six plus years’ remembrance from its narrator. One would think that time would add a veneer of abstraction between Joon and her experiences, the narrator and her former selves, but Mun writes, amazingly, as if she were still actually there. A passage about a third of the way through is worth quoting in full:
But before that, I sat with my face out the window, letting the sun zap the ants crawling behind my eyes. Two days of speeding, bagging, drinking crème de menthe, and snorting procaine, and now it was daylight, and the worms were already digging into my skin. The guy sitting next to me bit into a soggy taco. The smell of wet beef made me want to vomit.
All the characteristics of Mun’s prose are here: the directness—“I’m more in to showing, rather than telling,” she says and, above all, an unsettling physicality. Her writing is very sensual. When it succeeds, which is often, the effect is visceral and, well, skin-crawling—sometimes even emetic.
While Joon’s emotions are frequently dependent on her physical state—the most exalted moments of love occur under the influence of methamphetamine—she also has a preternatural ability to detach herself when things go badly. A beating is just a beating, coming down on the bus is just coming down on the bus. Herein lies what will annoy many readers of Miles From Nowhere: In spite of all that raw physicality, Joon is dispassionate and essentially passive. Things just kind of happen to her. She is sometimes indistinguishable from her environment, and her reaction is usually of the “whatever” variety, so her story fails to evoke the same visceral response for emotions that it does so well for her physical state. It’s better than Brontë-esque self-pity, maybe, but it makes it hard to root for Joon when she refrains from doing much besides trying to fit in, much less drawing any conclusions about her suffering.
The novel’s structure will also gall readers. Joon is terrific at connecting vignettes and remembrances within a single episode, which always corresponds to a single chapter—it’s the same free-associative effect found in Portnoy’s Complaint or Annie Hall. But she doesn’t explicitly connect the episodes with one another. They simply unfold in chronological order, with little obvious ontogeny but aging and the familiar story of addiction and recovery.
Much criticism of Miles from Nowhere has focused on its flimsy form—a Publisher’s Weekly review read, in part, “The novel’s episodic structure prevents Joon’s story from building to anything greater than its parts.” But Mun must have thought it foolish and overbearing to impose order on a story of endless homelessness. The form, after all, should be adapted to fit the tale. “To me,” she says, “it was absolutely crucial that I kept the episodic nature. I would have betrayed Joon to do otherwise. The episodic nature better reflects her fractured mindset ... and to me, she’s still trying to piece things together a little bit ... things are very much in the moment. There’s no traditional novel structure—I wanted there to be jagged edges, for the reader to feel viscerally.” We do feel these jagged edges of meth and crawling skin, but there are vestiges of a traditional structure: sometimes the tale adapts itself to fit the form. Joon turns 18 and gets a real job at the end, and genre conventions of the “home-away-home” narrative abound. For example, Joon returns to her parents’ house at one point to find it abandoned and boarded up.
Mun is hinting at some progression here, but only hinting. Joon’s growth is so delicately wrought that it’s easy to miss it and miss out on the joy of the novel. “She’s passive,” says Mun, “but in the end she becomes very strong and very stubborn.” Mun’s tendency to show and not tell and her novel’s cinematic structure as a collection of set-piece short stories—“sort of a hybrid,” she says, “a ‘stepping-stone novel’”— “require a certain kind of reader.”
She elaborates: “I need for the reader to meet me halfway. There are so many books out there where the reader needs to go maybe 10 or 15 percent—the reader doesn’t have to do too much. I’m asking them to do more work.” But when he does do his work, the reader finds aesthetic bliss, drawing connections between parts of Joon’s narrative as Joon does when she uncorks a mind-blowing metaphor. The prose is as gritty and lively as an inner-city mural, with an even greater concentration of detail. Joon confronts rape, pregnancy, violence, sex, hard drugs, betrayal. Characters—twinks and transsexuals, foot fetishists and paternalistic white folks—appear and disappear as in some grotesque picaresque.
Miles from Nowhere is kind of like Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in its loose structure, and fans of recent cinema will also be reminded of Slumdog Millionaire. But while crushing poverty is crushing poverty everywhere, Mun’s setting is distinctly Ed Koch’s New York, conjured up with admirable restraint through the occasional bauble: stickball, OTB, Pac-Man, Playland, “Orientals.”
“I was very selective about the details because I wanted a reader in Seattle or Chicago to be able to relate to it. I wanted it to have the feel of an urban novel, but the events could happen anywhere in this country,” says Mun. And Miles From Nowhere is a tale both universal and local, a brave debut by a stark stylist in command of her idiom. I like its structure and the subtlety with which Mun bounds her successive links, but for many readers its tragic flaw will be that of most fiction of overpowering squalor. In spite, or because, of their compelling material, neither Joon the character nor Joon the narrator are compelling characters. It requires dedication and maybe even a re-reading to watch Joon become “strong and stubborn.”
“I’m just grateful people are reading the book,” says Mun, and in the end, so was I.