By Nami Mun
[Riverhead Books, 2009. 286 pages, $21.95 hardcover]

Reviewed by Rea Frey (B.A. ’04)

From the first winding sentence, Columbia fiction writing professor Nami Mun constructs a blunt, gritty tale of teen heroine Joon, a strong but vacuous girl who knows nothing of grief, love, or the ordinariness of childhood. After escaping a tragic home life in favor of the streets, Joon crosses the paths of quirky characters like one would encounter friends in grade school, with each providing stark life lessons.

From drug addiction, rape, teen pregnancy, and homelessness to abuse and even death, Joon bounces between one vile situation and the next over the span of five years. She does it perfunctorily, as if it is her duty to experience tapped veins, dirty shoes, and the sweaty bodies of strange men.

Mun’s ability to attack with distinct images, grimy settings, obtuse characters, and detestable situations sets Miles from Nowhere on a charged pace from page one. She delivers the story in an authentic, almost deadpan narrative. Where other authors might have clumsily fumbled through such grotesque, often clichéd subject matter, Mun paints the story matter-of-factly, allowing readers the chance to form their own interpretations. Do we feel sorry for Joon? Do we loathe her? Do we want to keep reading? The answer, almost inexplicably, is yes.

In one of the most daunting sequences, where Joon and her boyfriend are high on dust, he decides he wants to see Joon’s insides:

He splayed the cuts with his fingers and examined them, making little sounds of discovery. I asked him what he saw now.

He got up, almost tripped while stumbling to our table, and came back with a spoon. He jimmied the handle of the spoon into a cut until he found something he could tap.

Miles from Nowhere is a sharp, gravelly read. We will remember the attempt at an abortion with knitting needles and clothes hangers, Joon punching her own budding womb; the pot-smoking man who shish-kebabbed himself with a tree branch; the irrational fear of dwarfs with short arms; Knowledge, Benny, and the agoraphobic nun; and the gorgeous, almost out-of-place poetic phrasing that pops up: “The asphalt was a lace of sparkling diamonds.”

Mun’s tight, sporadic vignettes about serious subjects—rape, abandonment, death—manage, in just a page or two, to feed us all the information we need. This is a book of surprises, where each chapter is a new adventure, with no specific plot. However, readers will follow this tough but naïve heroine, who floats along through the muck
of life wanting only a warm blanket, a steady paycheck, and perhaps her next hit of heroin. Later, much later, she will come to know the realities of sacrifice and love.

Nami Mun teaches creative writing at Columbia. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as scholarships from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.

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