Drift

by Jim Miller

Exposes the hollowness of a city's boom years

Joe Blake is searching for something real in a seemingly depthless world. An alienated, underemployed professor and aspiring poet, Joe roams San Diego in his own personal disquiet and discovers that agony and ecstasy coexist all around him.

Joe has fallen in love with Theresa Sanchez, a single mother cultivating her own garden of doubts. As Joe and Theresa negotiate their intimacy amid bouts of passion and lines of Neruda, they find common ground in their yearning for a more authentic life. But what they later discover along a lonely stretch of highway is almost too real for them to bear.

As Drift uncovers the hidden past of this southwestern mecca--a history inhabited by the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller, Mission Indians, and Theosophists--it captures the underlying emptiness and unease of San Diego circa 2000. Blake plays the postmodern fl neur in a theme-park city, drifting with the poetic eye of Baudelaire and the critical sensibilities of Walter Benjamin and the Situationist avant-garde. Depicting the sex, drugs, and death found in the borderlands, author Jim Miller portrays a city where cultures sometimes clash but more often pass one another almost wholly unaffected.

Drift features original art by Perry Vasquez and photography by Jennifer Cost. A startling work laced with premonitions of dread, Drift is a Whitmanesque journey that puts readers squarely in its moment as it exposes the seamy underside of modern America.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806138076
• ISBN13: 9780806138077
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A profound and deeply rooted novel

I loved this novel. Miller tells a poignant tale of a city and its drifting people; it's a wonderful mixture of philosophy, musings interwoven wth fascinating bits of little known San Diego history. Poetic, passionate, and transcendant, Drift is a truly unique, beautifully written book that includes art and photography--a rare, literary find.

Engaging and provocative exploration of a city and its inhabitants

I found this to be a lively and engaging read. The city of San Diego (sometimes viewed as America's blandest city) is as much a character in the novel as are the various people wandering through the city and through their lives - trying to make sense of the world. Various characters are always seraching for something - whether it is beauty or another fix or the capacity to forget. One of the strongest aspects of this novel is the way that it reaches out beyond the two central characters to tell of a multitude of stories - of the cities new immigrants, homeless people, suburbanites, academics. In that sense, the novel reflects that which is best about cities in general - the way different types of people are always rubbing up against each other.

An interesting meander through history and consciousness

I had the pleasure of seeing Jim Miller read from Drift accompanied by a jazz trumpet one night. Imagining a slow-tempo jazzy soundtrack, kind of moody and introspective, is almost impossible not to do while reading Drift. It is meditative and insightful, yet there is something on every page that makes you chuckle. Drift is fascinating because of its expirimentation with perspective; we get to see a lot of what Joe Blake and Theresa Sanchez are thinking, stream-of-conscience-like (and without an overly self-conscious narrator that sometimes "invades" S-of-C-like books) but also other characters that subliminally inter-twine with each other throughout the narrative as well. In a set of chapters, for example, two separate people -- an older man and an older woman -- experience the same city, some of the same places, on the same day, even crossing paths -- yet they have totally different experiences and feelings. This book is great for procrastinating during mid-terms, reading for sobriety, remembering not to take yourself too seriously...etc. Highly recommended.

A very fine debut novel

"Drift" is Jim Miller's first novel. His previous publications include "Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire" (with Kelly Mayhew) and "Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See" (with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew). [...] The central narrative of "Drift" concerns a romance between teacher Joe Blake and his former student, Theresa Sanchez. Many other narrative strands are introduced, serving to locate Joe and Theresa within a web of social (class, ethnicity, etc.) relations, and to generate the illusion of urban simultaneity. The central narrative is quite effective; the sense of these character's seeking a better life through mutually shared extremes of experience is skillfully drawn by Miller, without lapsing into overt sentimentality or pathos: the desperate nature of their social realities is presented as a concrete fact, yet it never overdetermines their autonomy and presence as individuals. There is also a fairly long section concerning Joe's "drift" through urban San Diego that climaxes with a sublime appreciation of urban ambience via its architecture that is very well done, and is quite evocative of the sorts of guided experiential epiphanies that Situationist theory might indicate. Also very skillfully handled is the inclusion of a Left social history of San Diego (this in italicized passages strategically located throughout the text), which provides a specific context of historical agency in which to locate these various narrative strands, and also in a sense accomidates Jameson's critique of the uniquely ahistorical nature of contemporary society, of which San Diego, a city sleepwalking through time, is an almost absurdly postmodern example. Reading the novel does suggest some questions regarding intended audience; it would be far too easy, in my appreciation, to regard "Drift" as of a species of local novel, one in which the setting is so suggestive as to overwhelm the more universal aspect of its core themes and concerns. That said, there are some intensely felt pleasures to be found here for local readers: a pround sense of place generative of a way to "read," understand and act within these sometimes seemingly oblique, ephemeral and sun-dazed urban spaces.