Andrew Miller. The Optimists.

Henry, Richard

Andrew Miller. The Optimists. New York. Harcourt. 2005. 313 pages. $24. ISBN 0-15-100727-6

ANDREW MILLER'S fourth novel, The Optimists, is curiously titled, given the disillusionment and despair that is everywhere evident throughout the novel. As in his previous Booker- and Whitbred-nominated Oxygen, Miller explores his characters' varied inabilities to engage successfully with the world, specifically in the creation of characters that are already, by profession, at least one step away from "reality": Clem Glass, a photographer who finds himself unable to hide behind his camera as he witnesses the savagery of the massacres in a Rwanda-esque African country, a savagery made personal by his photographs of Odette Semugeshi--a child who survived, wounded, amid the bloody carnage. His sister, Clare, an art historian whose specialty is nineteenth-century painting, has withdrawn due to illness (paranoia and hallucinations). Neither can hide behind their respective lenses.

If direct engagements with the world are dangerous, so are their attempts to avoid them. The question is simply, How can one live in this world, given that the social contract which binds humans together is violated with such brutality? The story focuses on Clem and his need to seek justice for Odette and those who have been massacred. He travels to Toronto seeking perspective from a colleague who was with him in Africa and, ultimately, to Brussels for a largely unsatisfying encounter with Ruzinada, the man responsible for the massacre. But the story is also one of the undoing of Clem's own ties to humanity. Severed from other humans by the shock of the dead, he wanders about the city of London numb to the ordinary rules guiding social interactions. That shock, however, only brings to the surface what is already deeply imbued in Clem's character--a lack of interest in engaging others, friends and family alike, in the ordinary niceties of human interaction. His camera, of course, is the obvious symbol for such distancing. The optimism, if, indeed, there is any, given the enormity of the violation, lies in small acts of kindness, in often little more than feeding and caring for others--particularly his sister.

Clare's recovery and the story of Clem's coming to terms (or moving toward such terms) with his interpersonal relationships are more interesting, indeed more satisfying, than the grander social indictment that lies too close to the surface.

Richard Henry

SUNY, Potsdam