The Optimists - Hardcover

Miller, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151007276 ISBN 13: 9780151007271

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005

Synopsis

Clem Glass was a successful photojournalist, firm in the belief that photographs could capture truth and beauty. Until he went to Africa and witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre.
Clem returns to London with his faith in human nature shattered and his life derailed. Nothing-work, love, sex- can rouse his interest and no other outlook can restore his faith. The one person Clem is able to connect with is his sister, who has made her own sudden retreat from reality into the shadows of mental illness, and he finds some peace nursing her back to health in rural Somerset. Then news arrives that offers him the chance to confront the source of his nightmares.

From the celebrated author of Ingenious Pain and Oxygen, this is a masterfully rendered novel that explores the peril-ously thin line between self-delusion and optimism.

About this title

About the Author

ANDREW MILLER's first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Award. He was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for his novel Oxygen. He lives in Brighton, England.

Reviews

A powerful study of emotional trauma, English writer Miller's third novel (after Ingenious Pain and Oxygen) probes the horrors of genocide as well as what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." Clem Glass is a veteran photojournalist who thought he was inured to man's inhumanity to man until he witnessed the aftermath of a genocidal massacre in Africa. Unable to wipe the images of murdered women and children from his mind, Clem wanders distraught around London. When his older sister, Clare, a professor in Dundee, has a recurrence of the mental breakdown she suffered some years earlier, Andrew is at first unable to deal with any additional emotional problems. Instead, he flees to Canada to consult a colleague, a journalist who also witnessed the massacre and found solace in caring for society's outcasts. Eventually, Clem takes responsibility for his sister and nurses her back to health. When he finally confronts the man responsible for the slaughter in Africa, he realizes it's impossible to exact revenge for an act of such cosmic evil. He himself must hit emotional rock bottom before he achieves a tentative optimism and reaffirms his faith in life. Miller's story is starkly illustrative of the wide range of human behavior in the so-called civilized world. The guardedly positive ending reveals the irony in the book's title; only "a small, stubborn belief" can be wrested from the circumstances of modern life. (Apr. 5)
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For photojournalist Clem Glass, the camera captures truth and beauty--but also pain. After witnessing the aftermath of a massacre while on assignment in Africa, the 40-year-old Londoner can't get his life back on track. Glass isn't the only member of his family in a precarious state. His older sister, Clare, has lapsed into mental illness after a two-decade reprieve, and his father has fled civilization for an eerie Scottish retreat. Numb even to the pleasures of love and sex, Glass finds solace as a caregiver to his sister. Miller, the author of Oxygen (2002), renders potent, polished prose. Here, Glass revisits his photograph of a young girl in the wake of violence: "Ten years old, bandaged, graceful as a blade of grass. The daughter of murdered parents, the friend of murdered children. She returned the camera's stare with a gaze of the quietest imaginable outrage." Alas, the plot loses its punch near the end, finishing with a nebulous conclusion that lacks both nuance and nerve. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151007276
• ISBN 13: 9780151007271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 313