Staff Picks: Chili’s, Chapbooks, and Childcare

Mary Miller.

I’m inclined to call Mary Miller’s new novel, , a lonely book. The narrator, sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald Jr., is perhaps how one might cynically imagine the average late-middle-age man. He’s recently divorced, distant from his daughter, anticipating an inheritance from his father’s death, and living a quiet, burger-and-beer-fueled existence in front of TV marathons of . On a detour to avoid his ex-wife, he impulsively adopts a dog named Layla, and his solitude becomes a strange, blundering parenthood. Louis oscillates between embitterment and naivete, cloaking his anxieties in a devotion to Layla that verges on delusion. But even as he falls prey to shortsighted impulses—which include is everything I want in a story: a man with an affinity for leftover Chili’s, an antisocial dog with digestive challenges, and a bunch of truly dislikable people I love regardless.