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InFight No Morethe mix of bone and tissue makes for a living thing.
(Shes also the author of a series of eco-thrillers for young adults.)
Millet pays little heed to the boundaries of realism and even less to those of class.
She takes on big political themes like environmental despoliation, structural inequality, and the bomb.
The character who links these stories together is a real-estate agent named Nina.
Real estate is an inherently banal subject, and people who really like talking about it are always boring.
(Housing and land use as political issues are a different matter.)
ButFight No Moreisnt about real estate.
The crisis of moving house is Millets way into the lives of a disparate set of characters.
Ninas clients are coming to the ends of things of marriage, of life, of the existential rope.
These ends set off new, usually diminished beginnings.
He leaves the house with her sobbing on a sofa.
Theres room in Millets fiction for genuine villains and petty forms of revenge.
Theres also a place for mental illness and departures from realism.
The woman puts her house on the market with Nina as the agent.
We learn in another story, in an offhand reference, that her name is Delia.
Wasnt funny at all, that was a given, but also had no apparent meaning.
Those cartoons, shed always thought, were tests of something, and she failed the test.
Shed like to know.
They put them in the magazine to enrage you.
Smart people talking in code.
Trying to bury you with their smartness.
Like an autistic kid reeling off difficult calculations.
These are accessible fictions.
The Men is the central story inFight No Moreand something of a turning point in the book.
Even real-estate transactions become poignant.
Shes left with his playlists and the task of selling his house.
