Daniel Miller (1) (1954–)

This book is an interesting one almost throughout, Miller's questions and conclusions are pertinent ones, and I've only a slight doubt that his study was conducted with a rigour and discipline that are not alwaus apparent in his presentation of it.

One of the editorial reviews refers to 'beautiful' writing. My eye beholds otherwise. Clauses that don't refer, as I turned the pages, aren't so comely as that. Sentences that aren't quite. Dickinsonian use of--dashes. These weird constructions and punctuations are only occasional but they do force one to stop and re-read a phrase or sentence to get the meaning. It struck me that Miller must have dictated the book--in speech the problems mightn't have been problems--and the tapes transcribed by someone not up to the job. When I read that 'wicker' was a version of witchcraft, I was certain I'd hit upon it. In the afterword Miller speaks of writing up his interviews, though, so apparently the blame lies with him. (There are other wonderful howlers: that famous Irish patriot Michael Douglas is mentioned, and we're told that the Rosebud of Citizen Kane was a snowboard.)

There is also far too much Daniel Miller in the book. Miller is observer not subject, and so why must he inform us that he's a bit of a romantic? I don't care what football team he supports, I really don't care what he thinks of Mark Rothko, and I really and truly don't care about his love of John Peel. Less obviously but even less forgivably he seems to want to force his own reactions to certain subjects upon the reader. He's all but fawning when discussing one family, and tells us of crying after interviewing a lonely man. I don't see that any of these things has a place in a quasi-academic book.

The last reservation I have about the book is that in the descriptions of the subjects and their belongings there's no clue as to the source of Miller's remarks. There's little direct quotation and no internal evidence as to whether a statement like 'the pet iguana's grin was a form of welcome' is an indirect quotation or paraphrase of an iguana's owner, an impression or speculation of Miller's, or a conclusion Miller drew from what he learned during the visit. This to me is the biggest problem with Miller's writing. There's a big difference between deciding to keep the writing casual and witholding necessary information from the reader.

I don't mean to suggest this is a bad book; it isn't. I've gone on at such length to let readers know what to expect; some of them might be hoping, as I was, for writing more scholarly than this. Perhaps this should have been broken into and published as two different books, one outlining the study, reporting the possessions and interviews, and detailing conclusions in a much longer afterword and the other given a title like like Life is a Funny Old Thing: Musings from an Anthropologist and marketed to a different set of readers.… (mais)