The Registry of Forgotten Objects
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.” Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coincidence and loss suffuse Harvey's polished if underwhelming metafictional debut collection. In "The Drought," a weatherman carries on an affair with his hair stylist under the nose of the stylist's older husband, a barber who runs the salon with her. In "Beachcombers in Doggerland," a married couple mourns their son's death in a surfing accident, and the barber pole featured in "The Drought" washes ashore as they walk the beach. The narrator of "The Man Who Slept with Eudora Welty," an apparent stand-in for the author (he describes publishing the abovementioned stories), recounts taking a train as a student many years earlier and reading a book by Eudora Welty, which prompted his seatmate to launch into an account of his alleged sexual exploits with Welty. Reflecting on the incident now, the narrator muses on details in Welty's work that show up in his own life, "as if someone else is observing my life from the other side of the page." Harvey wears his influences on his sleeve in other stories, too, summarizing multiple works by Welty and Edgar Allan Poe. The gestures at the classics are often clever, but Harvey's ideas feel underbaked. This doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts.
