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...

 

Sue Miller once again sharply defines a powerful tale of women, marriage, and the challenges of motherhood and impending age. Meri, newly married, pregnant, and naive, moves into a New England townhouse shared by Delia Naughton, wife of Senator Tom Naughton. This accidental proximity provides a rich fascination for Meri as she explores the complexity of the couple's bond. Meri contrasts Delia's compromises with her own marriage and begins to notice striking parallels. Miller's precision in the use of metaphor, introspection, and emotion is wed by Blair Brown's vocalizations into a most compelling fusion. Brown's expression of the more mature Delia is reminiscent of the imperious intonations of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she also accurately captures the slurred and halting speech of a stroke victim. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

"Pure Miller . . . tasteful, elegant, sensuous . . . insightful, complex . . . The Senator's Wife is Miller's latest extended contemplation of marriage, and a master class in the refinement of craft."

 

"Complex and beautifully drawn . . . with her keen eye and precise prose, Ms. Miller expertly conveys the passage of time and the evolution of emotions, giving readers the sense of lives fully lived."

 

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"I closed The Senator's Wife and instantly wished there was someone around with whom to discuss the Jodi Picoult like ending."

 

"But more important and distinctive is the power of a style that never announces itself as 'style' and that is consonant with a nonjudgmental poise of presentation. T. S. Eliot once wondered whether Shakespeare really 'thought' anything at all: 'He was occupied with turning human actions into poetry,' Eliot decided. Something similar might be said about Miller's impartiality, her refusal to assign blame or 'explain' why things happen as they happened. Her sense of life one calls it that, inadequately is such that we are content to discover with her the powerful connections among the characters and events she imagines."

 

"[K]een psychological insight, her radar for emotional nuance, her visceral understanding of familial dynamics. . . . Ms. Miller's innate sympathy for her characters and her shrewd understanding of the mathematics of family life go a long way."

 

"Miller has always been adept at rendering the complexities of family life, the way even well-intentioned, decent people can't walk across a room without wounding at least one person they love."

 

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"[Miller] succeeds brilliantly. . . . Miller's characters have room to breathe, to be confused and petty and clear-headed and generous, to get swept up by passion, to fall in love and have children and watch as those children grow away from them, to fall in and out of love with their spouses, to stay married or get divorced, to have sex and drink wine and dance. Miller is adept at creating believable characters of all ages, from toddlers to great-grandparents, but her specialty is the middle-aged woman caught between her responsibilities and her desires. . . . Sue Miller has proven herself a master of contemporary life."

 

"Over the span of her many novels, Sue Miller has used simple, straightforward prose to plumb the irregular heart that beats deep within the relationships of men and women. Whether these relationships are made up of romantic attachments or the bonds that connect parents and children, Miller knows exactly how to corral their turbulent emotions and complex revelations into a fluid, compelling story of everyday life."

 

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"Sue Miller is an Anne Tyler with edge, an Amy Tan without the sentimentality. Like Mary Gordon, she holds moral dilemmas up to the clarifying light of messy everyday reality. And like some Gail Sheehy of fiction, she tracks with authority all our difficult passages from childhood through old age. . . . Miller's prose is seamlessly composed, tailored for introspection and quiet revelation rather than show."

 

"Miller's greatest asset: her ability to construct a grainy, close-focus portrait of her characters, both in relation to each other and in their interior lives."

 

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"[Miller] has a keen eye for nature and ambiance. . . . Miller excels in chronicling nuances of domestic affections, half-truths, self-conscious creation of one's self and the bittersweet fiction of memory."

 

"Reading a Sue Miller novel is like listening to your best friend tell a story. Over the years, she has cultivated a certain artlessness and a way with domestic details that make you feel as though you're at a kitchen table, watching your friend while she embroiders her tale and chops onions for supper. The strength of her work is its detailed realism. There are food and weather both lovingly described, dirty diapers in a toilet bowl, a cross-eyed fox stole. And the characters are as solidly a part of the earth as their surroundings."

 

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
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