Review: "Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles" by Ron Currie Jr.

If you’re a hopeless romantic, like I am, Ron Currie Jr.’s new novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is a book I guarantee you will love. And I loved it whole-heartedly. Every saccharine and cheesy moment I bought into with every short chapter. If you are not and take a cynical and ungrateful viewpoint when it comes to romance, this book is not for you. In fact, this book sort of looks down on that viewpoint, and brings to light many reasons why I get so angry when I see people handle sex romance, and love so carelessly, and never, ever take it seriously, even when they are in a relationship. This book is not for them, and it shouldn’t be. This is a book for the underdogs of romance, the ones who struggle for recognition, only to sit back and watch others take for granted what they have desired for so long. In the fictional version of himself that Ron Currie Jr. has crafted, we get that kind of person, whose love and devotion for one women extends beyond what many of us would ever consider going through. And the story he tells, in precise short chapters that make for an easy read, is what happens when that devotion becomes a catalyst that leads to the fictional Currie being the most hated man in America. The novel begins with Ron waiting on a Caribbean island while the love of his life and the person this book is all about, Emma, is back in the Sates dealing with personal issues. We never dislike the fictional Ron, even when he begins sleeping with someone else to stave off loneliness. The adventures he has on the island are fun to read about. He gets drunk, gets into fights, and hangs out with people you would see in a Bolano book (one is even named Roberto). Finally, after hitting rock bottom, Emma comes back, only to leave him again, supposedly for good this time. In a fit of despair, Ron drives his car off a pier in a suicide attempt. Surviving, but seeing an opportunity to disappear, he writes a suicide note, and effectively fakes his own death. What he doesn’t know is that the note and the book he was working on (about Emma, of course), are found and published making him a posthumous celebrity, until a serious of tragedies bring him back to the life he left, and the reckoning of a public that has been lied to. Mixed in with this story is the tragic tale of the slow death of Ron’s father, which adds to the sympathy we feel for him (a particularly funny segment comes when he takes his ailing father to see The Game Plan starring The Rock), along with Ron’s thoughts on the Singularity, where all computers gain sentience at once. A delightful book that is fun to read, but also a truthful and soulful ode to the kind of love we all feel for someone once in our life and our silly, sometimes impossible desires to see those dreams come true, this a beautiful book I hope you read.

Rating: 5/5