~ The Senator’s Wife, by Sue Miller ~
Sue Miller’s novel follows two very different women who happen to live next door to one another in a university town. And their two very different marriages.
Meri and Nathan are a young couple who just bought one side of the attached duplex. Nathan is a new tenure-track professor, and Meri, sad to give up her job at the alumni magazine,
will contribute nothing to the purchase of the house — she has nothing, and nothing is coming to her.
Delia, next door, is the wife of Senator Tom Naughton:
This old woman is someone who was a beauty once, Meri would put money on it. A beauty of the handsome, commanding sort. Maybe a little intimidating, actually.
Chapters alternate between Meri and Delia’s lives, past and present.
The contrast between the two marriages is the focus of the book, and Miller keeps the lens in tight, without commentary on events of the time, or much time spent on extraneous characters. Delia thinks occasionally about the old lady who lived in Meri and Nathan’s house. Meri’s colleagues at the local radio station appear in her chapters. And that’s about it.
Delia goes to her apartment in Paris for a few months of each year, and Meri is asked to water her plants while she is away. Meri has always been fascinated by the elegant Delia, and her trips into Delia’s house inch into voyeurism.
Meanwhile, we learn more about Tom’s infidelity, how and why Delia and Tom remain married and on good terms, with occasional trysts and visits. Meri’s pregnancy is tracked in detail, and the author seems to be pointing out how dramatically pregnancy and motherhood change the lives of women.
Miller writes well, and her exploration of the women’s inner lives is very well done.
Delia can remember fondly the parties in their first small apartment, when the children were tiny and she served Wheat Thins and Ritz crackers with a vivid orange cheese streaked with pink — its name lost to time, its dye probably carcinogenic. The booze was all anyone cared about, anyway.
At dinner, Meri had her turn receiving Delia’s energetic attention. She found herself explaining her work in almost as full detail as Nathan had his. Delia was a person who could say ‘Fascinating!’ and make you feel suddenly that your life was.
Miller’s characters are very normal, familiar people who make unconventional choices. Their rationale and rationalizations for these choices are what makes the novel interesting.
As with Miller’s The Arsonist, though, the finale is mildly puzzling. The whole book was very slow, quiet, and carefully developed — pages spent on half an hour that Meri spends in Delia’s house, for example — and then there is a brisk summing up towards the end as if the author needed to finish up for a deadline. The abrupt change of pace can be a little disorienting, although it does provide a nice summary of what has happened to the characters in the intervening years.
Of the two Miller novels I have read, The Senator’s Wife is the stronger, with better developed characters and a more intense plot. Although I would not re-read it, I would pick up another Miller novel if it came my way.
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