Big World

Don’t let the title fool you; very little about Miller’s debut story collection is big.

If you’re not ready to commit to reading e-books on your iPhone, you could practically fit Big World—published as part of Hobart’s Short Flight/Long Drive series—snugly into your iPhone case as a simulation. But putting aside the physical size of the book, inside we find characters confined in small towns and the agonizingly small expectations such places generate. When the notion of the “big world” is finally evoked, about three-quarters into the book and after a late-night phone conversation between a woman and her ex-husband, it’s drenched in irony and pain: “Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was.”

That sense of claustrophobia never lets up. In “Leak,” a 16-year-old girl and her widower dad can’t even begin to figure out how to talk to each other. She leaves her house only to enter the dark basement of her sun-allergic, home-schooled friend. In “Fast Trains,” a woman lounges in a downtrodden hotel room with a man she’s trying to like. In “Pearl,” a trip to the casino ends with a middle-aged man shuddering in self-loathing next to the sleepless narrator.

Poorly concealed traps lie all over for the women in Big World in the form of married men, exes, a damaged sense of relating to the world. In other words, the traps are so big, they hardly see them before walking straight in.

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