Personal Velocity Paperback – September 12, 2002

Boring

When a person of privilege assumes to write about non-persons of privilege but gives them all the neurotic, psychotic traits found in the elite, i.e., self-absorption, weirdness born out of ennui and lack of guidance and indulgence, for starters and overlays it with a film of the disgusting, you have a tangled mess of something sub-par trying to call itself literature. A cold offering that did nothing to touch me, move me, inspire or even impress me, except to fill me with the question, who did she know to get published. And then I realized, she is Arthur Miller's daughter and married to Daniel Day-Lewis.I do not recommend this boring, dragging excuse of a book.

Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity is poignant and insightful. The details of different women's psyche is in the way of a genius. I thoroughly enjoyed this book..she needs to write a novel..I was longing for the stories to go on.

Personal Velocity is a collection of 7 stories by the author Rebecca Miller. (daughter of playwright, Arthur Miller) All of the stories have women at their center. Most of the stories are independent, but there are a couple that share characters. I have seen the movie, which only included three of the stories. This may have made me biased, since I got a visual of those three stories.Greta was about a woman who was planning on leaving her husband and has always had a problem with infidelity. She is always trying to impress her father, who left her mother when she was young. She is a cookbook editor who gets to edit a very popular authors book, and gets involved with him as well.Delia is a woman who leaves her husband, finally, after continued beatings. She goes from a woman's shelter to an old acquaintence's house. She grew up very promiscuous and hasn't changed that much.Louisa, who is also promiscuous, (I'm starting to notice a theme here) goes from lover to lover, and leaves when she starts to feel comfortable.Julianne and Bryna go hand and hand, as Bryna is Julianne's maid. Bryna imagines being interviewed and often talks to herself. She looks at Julianne as being this perfect woman who is married to a poet/writer 15 years her senior. Bryna always wanted to be glamourous, but instead, marries a farmer and lives with him and his strange mother.Nancy is a child who always has a nanny looking after her, but this nanny is also observing her, to see if she has anything wrong with her, because she once locked another girl in a closet.Paula is a woman who picked up a hitchhiker after being with a man who traded places with her on the street and got hit by a car. She thinks that this will change her karma.I liked the way this author writes, because she shows rather than tells, and she writes very simply to tell a deep story.I liked certain stories more than others, some just grabbed me more, which is why it didn't receive a higher rating.Basically, it was a little better than ok, but I have read some collections that I like more.

Okay...seven short stories about seven different women. Some stories were related to each other, some weren't. I took the term "personal velocity" to mean the rate at which an individual evolves, or changes, or comes into her own. Maybe I'm way off here. Maybe I just didn't get it. Great--that?s a nice thought. Anyway, I was surprised by all the raving reviews. Maybe it's the style in which Rebecca Miller writes. It's very simple and raw, almost inspiring. You get a very clear sense of the characters she illustrates...the stories read like little movies in your mind. However, many of these stories just left me cold. They didn't end, they just stopped. That's always annoying to me. Plus, after I finished reading this book, I felt...nothing! How can that be?? It's as if no one, not even the writer, really cared about these women. I like simplistic writing but this made me feel like I was reading a technical manual or something! (well, it wasn't that bad!)I enjoyed the story of Greta, the successful editor who's facing a hard decision about her marriage as her career takes a huge step up. I liked the story of Bryna because the conflict between her and her mother-in-law was so obvious but not a lot needed to be said about it. Plus her relationship with her husband was so sweet and simple compared to the relationships in the other stories. Nancy was an interesting kid. At first she struck me as a future serial killer, but then it was clear that she was totally neglected by selfish parents. Nancy was having some pretty interesting experiences as a result, but I don't really know what happened at the end of that story. I was confused by the parents' conversation. And I felt sad for Nancy. This is an example of where I clearly didn't "get it."Delia just [made me mad]. She seemed so reckless with herself, which ultimately led her to this awful marriage, and then she was so pleased with herself for continuing to be as reckless as she was before. Fine, she doesn't give a [hoot] about the men she's with, which gives her the power, which keeps her safe. What am I supposed to do with that? I was frustrated with the Julianne story because I wanted to know what would happen to her. She was like this ghost floating through her life. The end. On to the next story. Louisa was another interesting basket-case. So was Paula...but those girls didn't really evolve yet, they were "on their way" to do so when their stories ended.So essentially, this book is okay. It goes pretty quickly. But like I said before, it didn?t shake my world or anything. The most frustrating thing about it was that each story piqued my interest, but many of them ended too soon. Maybe that's why people loved it so much.

This book is a quick and easy read. However I feel her characterizations of the working class people are stereotypical and incompletely realized. She does much better with her portraits of those who lead more privileged lives. I have to agree with other reviewers in that her stories just stop as if she doesn't really know how to end them. I can't help wondering if this book would have gotten less attention if Ms. Miller did not have a very famous father (Arthur Miller) and husband (Daniel Day Lewis).