Chicago: A Commonplace Novel, Amey Miller

S o how do you read one first story, Adam and Eve’s impossible koan? Does it tell how humans lost touch with their animal neighbors? Just lost touch in general? It is hard to imagine God being as unforgiving, as relentless, as that story gives out.

S o it is, anyway, that my Hanna lives in my town; that I am her neighbor, so to speak, or in fact. She can talk too much, or too softly, or with garbled, self-dismissive laughs. She doesn’t get down to brass tacks. Like many of us, she is looking for love in wrong and right places, and she has a story to tell.