Dear Miss Metropolitan

… a complex novel to read. The subject matter is about as grim as grim gets … is complex to read, too, because of its structure. Ferrell mixes bits of narrative, collage-style, with snippets of news stories, with letters and lists and spells and incantations and social service assessments and the answers to tests and questionnaires. There are atmospheric photographs. The effect is to keep the book’s action slightly remote, at a distance … No real narrative force is permitted to develop in Ferrell’s novel, either. It’s an endurance test. I admired it while longing for it to end … Ferrell’s title, Dear Miss Metropolitan, summons to mind the murky comedy of Nathanael West’s 1933 advice-column novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. It’s a misleading title for this book … The author is a vibrant maker of sentences with a flair for casual surrealisms … There are few scenes of applied, extended torment in Dear Miss Metropolitan. But the dehydrated facts, unbearable in every detail, are more than enough. Over the course of the novel, they make something in your soul break down … It becomes clear, and not for the first time, that Ferrell is navigating American trauma writ vast, as well as her characters’ own. Some nightmares, and subsidiary nightmares, aren’t easily outrun.

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