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Summary
Summary
The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the bestselling While I Was Gone takes readers deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages, exposed in all their shame and imperfection and in their obdurate, unyielding love.
Author Notes
Sue Miller was born November 29, 1943. She received a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1964. She was a high school teacher, a cocktail waitress and a model before becoming a full time mother. Soon after the birth of her child, she divorced her first husband. Afterwards, she founded the Harvard Day Care Centers and worked as a preschool teacher. At the age of 35, she began writing after joining a writing workshop.
Her first novel The Good Mother (1986), which is about a divorced woman caught up in a fierce custody battle, was on the bestsellers list for six months. Her other works include Family Pictures (1990), For Love (1993), The Distinguished Guest (1995), and While I Was Gone (1999). She also has a short story collection titled Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories (1987).
Several of her books have been adapted into movies including The Good Mother (1988), which was directed by Leonard Nimoy and starred Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson; Family Pictures (1993), which starred Anjelica Houston and Sam Neill; and Inventing the Abbotts (1997), which starred Liv Tyler. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Smith College.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestselling author Miller (The Good Mother; When I Was Gone) returns with a rich, emotionally urgent novel of two women at opposite stages of life who face parallel dilemmas. Meri, the young, sexy wife of a charismatic professor, occupies one wing of a New England house with her husband. An unexpected pregnancy forces her to reassess her marriage and her childhood of neglect. Delia, her elegant neighbor in the opposite wing, is the long-suffering wife of a notoriously philandering retired senator. The couple have stayed together for his career and still share an occasional, deeply intense tryst. The women's routines continue on either side of the wall that divides their homes, and the two begin to flit back and forth across the porch and into each others physical and psychological spaces. A steady tension builds to a bruising denouement. The clash, predicated on Delia's husband's compulsive behavior and on Meri's lack of boundaries, feels too preordained. But Miller's incisive portrait of the complex inner lives of her characters and her sharp manner of taking them through conflicts make for an intense read. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
How loyalty and betrayal occur within marriage and within friendship are the central but not the only questions raised in this quietly provocative domestic novel from Miller (Lost in the Forest, 2005, etc.). In 1993, 37-year-old Meri and her new husband Nathan buy half a duplex in the Connecticut college town where he teaches history. Although Nathan and she have definite sexual chemistry, Meri is uncertain about the lasting power of their love. She is painfully aware of their different backgrounds, in particular his mother's continuing affection in contrast to her own lack of maternal love growing up. Their neighbor in the attached house is Delia, the wife of former Senator Tom Naughton. Meri is drawn to Delia as a mother figure, but Delia, while friendly, is slightly aloof. While house-sitting for Delia, newly pregnant Meri reads a stash of Delia's letters from Tom delineating the Naughtons' private marital history. Tom's infidelities made marriage impossible, especially after his fling with their daughter's roommate, but Delia and he have continued to rendezvous since their public separation. Shortly after Meri gives birth to her son, Tom suffers a debilitating stroke and Delia brings him back to Connecticut to care for him. Delia comments that she and Meri are living parallel lives, tending a baby and an invalid husband. Actually, the ever-insecure Meri feels alienated from Nathan, unloving toward the baby and generally ugly and unhappy. Delia, meanwhile, is thrilled to have her husband completely to herself at last. But even semi-paralyzed, Tom carries on a sexually charged flirtation with Meri that destroys Delia's temporary Eden. Years later, happily ensconced in her family life with Nathan and their three sons, Meri has found the capacity for love that Delia represented, but her remorse over betraying Delia remains limited. Despite an overly deliberate pace, Miller brings into stark yet uplifting relief the limitations of morality when confronted with love. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A recently married couple new to a New England college town purchases one-half of a double house because Nathan, a history professor, is thrilled to learn that the other half is owned by the famous, now retired senator Tom Naughton. But it seems that Delia, the senator's wife, lives alone. In her seventies, she is glamorous, charming, considerate, and armored to the teeth. Nathan's sly, smart, and moody wife, Meri, unnerved by her accidental pregnancy, becomes rather too intrigued with her secretive neighbor. Best-selling and impeccably literary Miller shrewdly contrasts the high drama of Delia and Tom's epically difficult marriage with the newlyweds' raw skirmishes, creating characters of intense interest and infusing everything thing they do with a kaleidoscopic array of meanings. Miller not only sharply illuminates the paradoxes of family life the difficulty of sustaining one's autonomy in marriage, complicated love for one's children, brutal shifts in power, the grimness of old age she also takes an askance view of Clintonian Washington and tests the thin membrane between private and public lives as she weighs the marathon demands on a politician's spouse. Miller's remarkable grasp of both grand passion and the consolation of the daily makes this an incandescent tale of betrayal and the perpetual divide between men and women, and a galvanizing novel of life's imperative to use yourself up. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TED NORDHAUS and Michael Shellenberger's 2004 essay "The Death of Environmentalism" sparked passionate debate and earned them a reputation as the bad boys of the environmental movement. Judging from their new book, "Break Through," which expands their argument in favor of a new approach to the urgent problem of global warming while continuing to go after former allies with gusto, it's a status they clearly relish. Nordhaus and Shellenberger hold less that environmentalism is dead than that it ought to die. The political strategies that worked against acid rain and smog, they argue, simply will not mobilize support to combat global warming. The problem begins with the very way environmentalists talk about nature. "Environmentalists imagine that Nature, like God, is outside of us and all-powerful," they write in a typical passage. Like church authorities claiming to speak for God, environmentalists claim authority by speaking for nature and translating what the Earth is "telling" us. Throughout the book, Nordhaus and Shellenberger refer to environmentalists in the third person, as if the term doesn't apply to them. In fact, both authors have substantial histories in the movement, for example as advocates for proposals like the New Apollo Project, an ambitious alternative energy plan that has been embraced by the Sierra Club and other mainstream environmental organizations. "Break Through" goes far beyond arguments about the feasibility of hydrogen or wind power, touring such subjects as Thomas Kuhn's revisionist ideas about scientific truth, Richard Rorty's "liberal ironism" and Francis Fukuyama's neo-Hegelian theory of history. Even if one shares the authors' enthusiasm for these subjects, as I do, it seems like a serious mistake to ground a political agenda in ideas like this: "There is no single, glorious and transcendent Science. There are only sciences creating contingent truths, toiling away to reveal, create and organize facts and theories until the next revolutionary paradigm comes along to reorganize entire worlds." Unfortunately, such pretentiousness obscures the book's very real strengths. Nordhaus and Shellenberger have worked in the environmental movement not as grand theorists but as public opinion researchers, and their work in this realm is enormously valuable. Polls often cited as evidence of broad support for environmental goals, they note, also show that support to be extremely shallow, making it difficult to persuade people to give up things they enjoy or need - cheap gasoline, jobs in industries like coal mining or logging - in order to advance environmental ends. In response, environmentalists tend to emphasize the dire consequences of inaction and, when that doesn't work, to ratchet up the doomsday narratives that Nordhaus and Shellenberger justifiably compare to religious tales of sin and damnation. "We know from extensive psychological research," they write, "that presenting frightening disaster scenarios provokes fatalism, paralysis and ... individualistic thoughts of adaptation, not empowerment, hope, creativity and collective action." Insecurity, they argue, is an emotional pillar of reactionary politics, not a building block for the sort of farsighted, progressive thinking that is required to prevent ecological disaster. Instead of sticking with this crucial point, however, "Break Through" tries to use postmodern philosophy to transmute an insight about public opinion into one about public policy. The authors conflate conventional environmentalist rhetoric and conventional policy prescriptions (mandatory curbs on carbon emissions) to create a supposed "politics of limits" that must be transcended through a "politics of possibility." But whatever the shortcomings of their rhetoric, environmentalists have a very good reason to push for some limits, however much of a downer that message might be. Global warming is caused by carbon emissions and can be contained only by reducing them. Nordhaus and Shellenberger's preferred alternative - huge investment in alternative energy - doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, without mandatory curbs on emissions, it might not work. For another thing, emissions caps would effectively provide a subsidy to less polluting alternatives, one that would be harder for lobbyists to manipulate and that wouldn't require lawmakers to pick winners among various possible technologies. Finally, even as a matter of crass politics, Nordhaus and Shellenberger neglect a basic point: the hard part about gaining support for a new initiative isn't convincing people of its value but finding the money to pay for it. The conventional solutions to global warming posed by the "politics of limits" - taxing carbon emissions, or issuing tradeable emissions to carbon-producing firms - conveniently raises revenue that could be used to pay for the very projects the authors wish to see. IN truth, few if any environmentalists oppose the sort of alternative-energy projects Nordhaus and Shellenberger favor. "Break Through" is more convincing in its case for a change in rhetoric. Conventional environmentalist policy is perfectly compatible with an optimistic vision of a landscape dotted with windmills and solar panels, of highspeed trains and energy-efficient office towers. But to win, Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue, environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear. The authors clearly relish their status as the bad boys of the environmental movement. Matthew Yglesias is an associate editor at The Atlantic. His book "Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats" will be published in April.
Library Journal Review
Meri, short for Meribeth, is going through some major changes: she just got married, moved to another state, and bought a new home. When she and her husband, Nathan, move into their New England townhouse, they learn that their neighbor, Delia Naughton, is the wife of the vaunted Sen. Tom Naughton. Delia is at the other end of the spectrum from Meri: her children are grown, and, for her, life is slowing down. Yet the two women hit it off and quickly become friends. Having their first child together teaches Meri and Nathan the nuances of married life; Meri, meanwhile, uncovers the mysteries of Delia and Tom's relationship. An intervening tragedy then causes a savage rift between Meri and Delia. Miller (The Good Mother) has written an extremely powerful novel of women, marriage, and friendship. The characters are fascinating, the story engrossing, and the novel incredibly readable. Highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/07.]--Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One: Meri, June 1993 From her perch in the middle of the backseat, Meri surveys the two in front--her husband, Nathan, and Sheila, the real estate agent. There is something generally vulnerable about the back of the head and the neck, she thinks. Nathan, for instance, looks a bit schoolboyish and sad from the back--his ears in particular--probably because of the haircut he had before they started out on this house-hunting trip. They've been at it for two days. Meri has occupied the backseat the whole time--at first because that's just how it happened when they all got in the car, and then by choice. She finds she likes the sense of distance. She likes the view she gets of their faces as they turn to speak to each other or to her--the profiles, the three-quarter angles. She feels she's learning something new about Nathan, watching him this way, hearing him ask his real estate questions. He has so many! Questions about heating costs, about taxes, about the age of appliances, about insulation and school districts. Why hasn't she thought about any of this? Because. Because the other reason she's sitting in back is that she can't bring herself to care very deeply about the house--whatever house it's going to be. The whole thing is Nathan's idea. Meri has sometimes spoken of it to him jokingly as "your big, fat idea," and, as it will turn out, that's apt: the house will cost much more than they'd planned on spending. But even that will have almost nothing to do with her. Nathan's the one with money. Not that he has a lot. But some. He was living penuriously in their midwestern college town when she met him, salting away what he could. He lived penuriously before that in another college town, a saver there too. In the end it has piled up a little bit. But more important, he has a mother willing to give him his "legacy," as she calls it, before her death. She doesn't need it, she has said repeatedly, and he does. The idea of a parent not only willing, but able, to help you out financially, before or after death, is alien to Meri. A legacy? She will contribute nothing to the purchase of the house--she has nothing, and nothing is coming to her. None of this means she's unsympathetic to Nathan. She loves him. She understands his impulses and wishes. He was miserable when they met, trapped in the meanest of academic environments, where his brand of scholarship and his popularity with students was looked on with a combination of contempt and envy. To be offered a job at a good college in the East, a job in a department that values the kind of work he does, a tenure-track job, a job with the promise of what might be called real money in these circles--this is a coup, an achievement. An escape. They celebrated the news by going out to dinner in the best restaurant in Coleman--the Italian place--and by spending a good deal of the following weekend in bed. The house they are planning to buy, whatever house it turns out to be, is supposed to be a further celebration of all this--of Nathan's new luck, of his new place in the world. It's supposed to mark, for him anyway, a great change, a beginning. For Meri, its meaning is less clear. She's sad to be leaving her life in Coleman and her apartment there. She'll miss her job and the people she works with at the alumni magazine. She'll miss their competitive telling of jokes. She'll miss their long meetings, the meandering conversations that would finally and inevitably come around, in some mysterious way that always surprised all of them, to the topics for articles they might do for the magazine. And she's just a little worried about her marriage. She knows Nathan is planning a life, a life which the house is part of, that she's not sure she wants to live. She doesn't know whether she can be at home in the place he imagines, in the way he imagines her being. She suspects there's trouble coming. But she feels if they can just hold on to the easy camaraderie and sexual heat of their early days, then they can find a way to keep talking about all this, a way of shaping their marriage to suit them both. Their first day with Sheila was a waste of time. They had agreed on this in their room at the inn yesterday evening, lying down exhausted and fully clothed on top of the bedspread, not touching. Nathan's hands were folded on his chest, as though he were arranged for viewing at a funeral home. They agreed they would have to raise their upper limit to get anything they really wanted--or Nathan suggested this and Meri went along. To her, everything they'd seen seemed possible. In each cramped little bungalow or shabby row house, while Nathan was getting visibly depressed, she was thinking how, if you just painted the pine paneling white or ripped up the orange carpet, if you took down the heavy layers of curtains and let the light in, the place could be livable. But because she could see Nathan's sorrow, she didn't try to sound hopeful or cheerful about anything. These weren't qualities he seemed to like in her anyway. And back at the inn she didn't even mention any of this. She agreed with him, she bolstered him. She was the one who finally got up from the bed and made the phone call to Sheila--told her they would need to start over with new rules the next day. Sheila has quickly pulled together a revised list for today's viewings. They've seen three so far. The first one was too far out of town--they both wanted to be able to walk or bike to work. The second one was just ugly, they all agreed over lunch. Fake-brick siding, a tiny dark kitchen. No. The third one, the one they've just come from, was lovely, a Victorian, but also much too big and in need of repairs. The porch actually bounced slightly as they strode across it, and inside Nathan pointed out the water stains on the ceilings and walls, the rotted window frames. Now Sheila is saying that this next one, the one she's driving them to, is a little out of their range, but she thinks it's so perfect for them that she just wants them to take a peek. She mentions a price that makes Meri flinch in the backseat. She looks quickly at Nathan. His face is in profile to her as he looks over at Sheila. Meri can see a small, bitter smile move across it. A danger sign, though Sheila doesn't know that. But Meri can sense what's coming. He's about to tell Sheila it's a lot out of their range. He's about to ask her not to waste their time. Maybe he's even about to say that they're tired, that they've seen enough for one day. But Sheila isn't looking at him. Her small, childish voice rolls on, an innocent and unstoppable flow. Meri thinks of clear, shallow water. "It's a double house, actually," she says. "You know, attached. The other side is owned by that old senator who's retired now. Oh, I bet you know him: what's his name? The famous one, more or less the Kennedy era. He even looked kind of like a Kennedy. Oh, shoot!" She smacks the steering wheel. Meri watches as Nathan's face changes, as the little smile disappears. He says, "Tom Naughton?" "That's it!" Sheila says. She turns and smiles at him. "They've owned it forever. I've got no idea how long. Since way before my time." There's a silence. Nathan turns to look at Meri. She can admire the sculpted line of his cheek, his jaw. "It wouldn't hurt to look, I guess," he says. "You know me," Meri answers. "Real estate voyeuse ." She tries to make her voice sound ridiculously sexy, she shimmies her shoulders, and Nathan laughs. That's good. He hasn't laughed, it seems to her, for a few days. But who's Tom Naughton? She'll have to look him up. When she met Nathan, Meri was living alone, in a place she loved--one vast room in an old brick building whose tall, bare windows looked out over the mostly empty main street of what was euphemistically called downtown Coleman. At one time the building had been a factory--harmoniums had been built there--and, factory-like, it had uselessly high ceilings, of pressed tin. In winter, the warm air rose up and sat just under these ceilings, far above Meri's head. Or at least she assumed that's where the warm air went. There was certainly none down where she lived. There, chilly breezes crisscrossed the room, on a stormy winter day sometimes actually stirring the piles of papers stacked everywhere. Meri wore multiple layers of clothes at home through the coldest months of the year, and huge green down booties all day and well into the night. She wore them to bed. She didn't remove them until she had been under the covers for a while and the heat of her body had begun to tent her safely. It was for this reason, among others, that she was grateful to have met Nathan in the early summer, when, even though it had no cross-ventilation, the apartment stayed cool and airy with the outsize windows thrown open. When she went barefoot at home, loving the feel of the painted wood under her feet. When she wore skimpy dresses that showed off how tall she was, how strongly built. When you could lie naked in comfort. They had known each other for only a month, lying naked in comfort for much of that time, when he moved in with her. They had married a month after that. They had been married for ten months when they flew to Williston to spend this long weekend looking at houses they might live in. When Sheila pulls up at the curb, Nathan sits quietly for a moment before getting out, looking up the walk. As though in reverence, Meri thinks. She follows his gaze. There's a for-sale sign planted in the deep lawn, and behind it rise the two attached brick town houses, built at the turn of the twentieth century, probably, with lots of white carved-stone trim around the windows and doors--curlicues and animal shapes. There's even a small couchant lion at the top of the stone steps up to the porch. They get out and go up the long walk under a wide oak tree. Moss is growing between the bricks under their feet. Sheila is talking to Nathan about the number of bathrooms, about the kitchen, which they would probably eventually want to renovate. Meri walks behind them, fishing a cigarette--one of the four cigarettes she allows herself daily--from her purse. "I'll come in in a minute," she says as Sheila works the front door with her key. They don't answer. Nathan disapproves of her smoking. Well, who wouldn't? But the sign of this is that he pretends not to notice it, that he not only ignores her when she's doing it, but any reference to it. It's as though the cigarette is an invisibility device, she thinks. Presto! Meri watches them step inside the house. She hears Nathan say, "Zowie." She finds her matches. She listens as they talk for a moment--he's asking Sheila about the age of the house; something about the floors--and then their echoing footsteps and voices move back into the house's depths. She sits down on the stone balustrade that encircles the large, rectangular porch. It's cool and damp under her buttocks. The porch is divided--Senator Naughton's half, their half--by a shorter balustrade projecting out from the wall between the two heavy wooden front doors. The lion rests on top of this, his mouth slightly open, as if he's just seen something that surprises him. She inhales deeply. She inhales deeply and thinks about sex with Nathan. There's been a drought, the last week or so, and she misses it. She misses him, she thinks. He has gone away from her, into thinking about his future. Their future, she corrects herself. From her perch, she can see up the long, broad street where nothing is happening, though somewhere children are yelling. The branches of the trees arch over from each side of the street and meet in the middle. The houses all sit back behind their imposing front yards. The Senator Naughton house is in a series of single and double houses that sit closer together at what must once have been seen as the less-fashionable end of the street. She turns and looks again into the opened doorway. She can see all the way through it, into a room full of light at the back of the house. The kitchen, no doubt. The kitchen they will want to renovate. Meri thinks about this word: renovate . She's not sure she wants to be a person who renovates anything. Renovating is different from painting the paneling or pulling up the orange wall-to-wall carpeting. Different how? Different because it takes money. That's the problem, isn't it? She's stepping into a bourgeois life, and she's being a little testy about it. Is it because the money isn't hers? couldn't be hers? She doesn't know. She inhales again, relishing the acrid taste. Sex is what did it, of course. They couldn't have been a more unlikely pair, more different. Nathan has what Meri has come to think of as credentials: a distinguished, or at least a solidly reputable, academic for a father--long deceased--a mother who has a silver tea service, inherited from her parents. Who used this tea service on the occasion when she met Meri. A mother who could say, when Meri admired it, "Oh, it's just plate," as though that made it less remarkable. In spite of herself and the choices she's made in her own life, Meri has a nearly inborn respect for all this, probably as a result of watching too much television in the seventies. When she and her sister played with their Barbies, Meri's Ken doll was always a doctor or a lawyer. Even then, even at eight or nine, she was a sucker for a notion of security derived from prime time. Meri's sister, Lou, was contemptuous. Her Ken was a movie star, or a cowboy, or a guy who raced motorcycles. Meri's Ken, she said, was a dult. This was a word they both used well into their teens. It was born of Meri's childhood misunderstanding of the word adult , which she heard as two words, article and noun. Lou had co-opted it to simultaneously point at, and offer judgment on, the world of the grown-ups. Dults , almost all of them. Excerpted from The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
