There are so many things that could be potentially cliche about Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere: the title, the cover, the characters, the plot — just about everything. The main character, Joon, runs away from home when she is twelve. Her father has left the family, which drives her mother to insanity. After leaving her mother, Joon goes down the inevitable path of drugs and prostitution as she copes on the streets of New York City. But there is something keeping this novel from falling into the trap: Nami Mun’s writing.

Joon tells her own story but, as Mun writes it, the story isn’t forced. Mun has created a striking character in Joon but she doesn’t throw her in your face. The writing is delicate and fluid; easy but precise. In this passage she describes a bus ride where she is looking for God (who she thinks is an elderly black man who saved her from being raped and then later helped her off of a crashed city bus):

Same time of day, same stop. I got on the bus again, having told no one about having seen God. If the news had gotten out, undeserving people would crowd the bus and I’d never see him again. This time, I was ready to go with. I had nothing left to give, and nothing anyone would want to take. My seat at the back corner of the bus was empty, so I sat there, hoping he would come, especially since I’d made sure not to be too high but just high enough to where I could stay still and not have my skin moving. I looked around in case he was there but had on a different disguise, but the only black person was an old blind woman up at the front.

Mun is keen to keep Joon’s innocence as intact as possible. A hard task because of the path that Joon’s life has taken; but, the reader is constantly reminded of her age and what she has lost.

While Joon’s life is heavy and gut-wrenching — there is little redemption and hope in a story of a teenage runaway who is addicted to heroin — Miles from Nowhere is not as visceral as, say, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Mun’s style is ethereal: each chapter, or section, is broken into vignette-like passages that delicately float the reader through Joon’s harsh life. A contradiction, but a well-played one that allows the reader emotional breaks. Continuing the passage from above:

God didn’t show up that day, but one of his angels did. She was maybe five years old with lemony hair, and she sat alone, three seats to my right. That was how I knew she was special. Five-year-olds in Sunday dresses didn’t sit in the back of the bus by themselves. That, and she held in her hands an egg timer, the kind that looked like a mini sundial. It was white, like her dress and stockings and shoes. She pretended to ignore me and I kept silent, not wanting to seem too desperate. The sunlight around her looked crisp and icy. I slid over a seat to feel its temperature.

This style also mimics how Joon goes through life — floating from one place to another always with new places and people in a foggy heroin haze. Mun allows us to flow with Joon’s story like a leaf in a stream. There is a quiet sadness in its graceless journey.

I picked up Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun because of its cover. It has been a while since I chose to read a book on such a meaningless impetus. The cover is an off-centered photograph of a city skyline — the skyline of the masses; not the center city with the massive skyscrapers, but the low-lying apartment buildings and row homes, the surrounding mazes. The sky is blue grey — a summer’s twilight, perhaps — that evokes a weight, a pressure, that forces those living there to move. A fitting picture for a book about a runaway junkie from the Bronx. Miles from Nowhere is a small novel heavy with poignant emotion and movement.

 

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