Flimsy Little Plastic MiraclesA Novel

Ron Currie Jr. begins his second novel with a clear invitation to call him a liar: “Everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T true,” he claims, and then proceeds to relentlessly throw that statement in our faces. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is presented as the memoir of one Ron Currie Jr., but very quickly we doubt that it is — while the book’s Currie, taken for dead, recuperates in Sinai after a failed suicide attempt, his manuscript sells millions of copies based on the erroneous public belief that he died tragically. This narrative intertwines with one much more authentically autobiographical: Currie’s father’s death from cancer (the title refers to the nicotine patches people use to try to quit smoking).

If this sounds like melancholy stuff, well, at times it is, but in Currie’s capable hands, this wide-ranging novel balances its poignancy with hilarity and outright wonder. It even gets vaguely utopian in the novel’s fascinating third strand, when the author turns his attention to the Singularity, the theorized techno-apocalypse that will come from runaway artificial intelligence, which Currie the narrator thinks is a sort of salvation. It all ties together in a thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us, those that come from “real life” or those we get from stories.

Narrated in short bursts — often just a paragraph in length — Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles slips past with beguiling ease but is not easily forgotten. This robustly entertaining, lightly philosophical quest proves Currie’s widely lauded first novel, Everything Matters! was no fluke.