THE SENATOR’S WIFE
What might it feel like to be married to a charming and handsome man,
highly accomplished, in many ways admirable, who propelled himself from
modest beginnings to the highest reaches of our government, who
professes undying love for you and appears to feel it, but who can’t
stop himself from repeatedly cheating on you in the most public and
humiliating ways? What might it be like to stay married to this man, to
spend
years of your
life campaigning for him, covering for him, while
at the same
time living apart, leading a separate life and discovering
new and personally gratifying pleasures and ambitions? What would it be
like to reunite with him, on your own terms, with your own power base,
to love him more fully, perhaps even to trust him — only to have your
faith finally, fatally shattered?These are the questions Sue Miller addresses in her latest novel,
“The Senator’s Wife,” a two-family saga about life on either side of a
two-family house in the early years of the Clinton administration.
Whitewater, Geniffer Flowers and the president’s sexual wanderings are the snippets of news that
stray into daily conversation in the New England college town where the
senator’s wife — with occasional “ceremonial visits” from the
great man
himself — lives her proud, solitary existence. Across the dividing
wall, in the adjoining house, are Nathan and his wife, Meri, who move
in after Nathan takes a teaching job at the college. It’s a big step in
his career and a great leap forward socially for Meri: she has worked
her way up from a marginal childhood to what feels like a very tenuous
perch in the professional class.Both are thrilled when they
discover the identities of their new neighbors. Nathan, a political
scientist, is delighted to be living so close to former Senator Tom
Naughton, a veteran of the greatest days of Great Society liberalism.
Meri, who has lost her mother to breast cancer, is desperate to find a
meaningful womanly connection (even when her own mother was healthy,
Meri remarks, she was “brain-dead”) and hopes that in the elegant and
lively Delia she’ll find the salve to soothe her achy soul.Unfortunately
for Meri — whose hurting, leaking, blushing, exploding physicality
inspires even this rather ascetic reviewer to indulge in sensory-rich,
overwrought and earnest phrases — Delia is destined to disappoint.
She’s got too many of her own “issues” to take on a needy surrogate
daughter. Notably, there’s her gorgeous lug of a no-good husband, who
cheated on her publicly and cheated on her privately and finally
cheated on her unforgivably by taking up with their daughter’s roommate
— the “beauteous” Carolee.In the wake of this affair, which
began right under Delia’s nose at a Christmas gathering in 1971, the
Naughton family scatters and Delia finds herself a pied-à-terre
in Paris, where she begins to spend several months of the year. (“The
croissant, the seedless raspberry jam, the rich dark coffee with
steamed milk. ... The consolation of the daily.”)Try
as she might, though, Delia can’t shake the man out of her hair. Or her
bed. Although separated, she and her husband remain lovers, painfully,
wistfully. Over time, they begin to conduct their marriage as if it
were a secret affair. This goes on for decades until Tom has a stroke,
and Delia, called back from Paris by one of her husband’s mysterious
lady friends, brings him
home to New England. With her husband broken
in body, mind and spirit, Delia at last finds true happiness. (Shades
of “Jane Eyre,” Meri muses.) Until, in the final turn of the plot, in a
playful moment of dramatic genius that redeems this ponderous, often
irritating
book, Delia’s heart is broken and she unties the knot for
good. I won’t reveal how the final betrayal occurs, but will
just say that in this particular moment Miller plays her hand in a
masterly fashion. Shock, deceit, desire and despair come together at
once in a way that feels simply like fate. In that remarkable bit of
novelistic choreography, I saw in Miller what her fans have always
seen: a clever storyteller with a penchant for the unexpected and a
talent for depicting the bizarre borderline acts, the unfortunate
boundary crossings and the regrettable instances of excessive
self-indulgence that can destroy a
world in a blink.These final
chapters provided a cathartic conclusion, an end-of-birthing experience
that all but erased the painful labor of reading that preceded it.
(Once again, I’ve been moved to this use of metaphor by Miller’s Meri,
who grunts and screams her way through the delivery of her first child
in the most miserable way.) Sue Miller is a highly popular,
well-respected and successful writer. But her writing here will appeal
primarily to readers who love sensual, earthy and earnest fiction — the
sort of fiction that brings you lots of “shiny red apples” and “pale
green grapes,” oysters with a “briny, sweaty, animal flavor” and
characters whose carnal attunements far exceed their capacities for
intelligent self-awareness. (“Oil sparks out from the skin of the
orange as she bends it, sparks out and disappears in the air, leaving
its scent behind,” is the kind of sensation that drowns out Meri’s
cognition.)I
somehow feel that if I were a right-on woman, I would identify deeply
with Miller’s hurting, bleeding, lactating heroines and greet her
sensuous descriptions of fruit and soft rain with a great sigh of
satisfaction. But I’m not and I don’t. For me, the world of her lushly
invoked senses seems intensely claustrophobic, as precious and cloying
as a purple-painted, patchouli-scented room.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.
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