The Senator's Wife
By Sue Miller
Knopf, 306 pp., $24.95
At almost the exact center of Sue Miller's eighth novel, a woman prepares to eat breakfast on the balcony of her apartment in Paris: a croissant, seedless raspberry jam, rich dark coffee with steamed milk. "She sat down and laid her napkin across her lap. The consolation of the daily, she thought."
It's a moment of pure Miller. Tasteful, elegant, sensuous, the scene celebrates a domestic epiphany as intense and glorious as a stained glass window. Simultaneously, the moment pierces the privacy of a character - the senator's wife, in fact - to lay bare her sensibility: middle-class grace notes of napkin and specially prepared milk; insightful, complex personal dialogue; and a rueful comment on the minor but not insignificant gratifications of everyday existence. For this author, the consolations of the daily are often the stuff of life.
But there's more. This brief pause in France marks the turning point of a carefully paced story about marriage and maturity - the moment when its heroine can choose either to continue her life of solitary quietude, which has been gained at considerable personal expense, or fly back to the hospital bedside of her husband, Tom. No prizes for guessing her choice. With Miller, it's not over until it's over.
"The Senator's Wife" is Miller's latest extended contemplation of marriage, and a master class in the refinement of craft. No pair of hands is safer when it comes to the fine sieving of mood, or impulse, or nuance of self-knowledge. No chronicler of family dilemmas is more comfortable with the minute ebb and flow of relationships that, over time, can wear down granite.
Here she enfolds a decades-long union within a much younger one, a symmetry allowing her a double female perspective and the chance to consider alternate versions of the arc of marriage. Chapter 1 opens with Meri and Nathan Fowler, 10 months wed, house-hunting in Williston, an East Coast college town where he has secured a tenure-track teaching job. Middle-class Nathan is buoyed by the prospect of his future while working-class Meri is traveling far more apprehensively, conscious that Nathan is planning a life "she's not sure she wants to live."
This opening seems to set the stage for marital conflict, breakdown even, yet those expectations remain unfulfilled. Instead, the young couple functions initially as a bridge to Delia Naughton, wife of charismatic politician Tom - "one of the really good guys," as Nathan describes him - who turns out to be the Fowlers' neighbor when they buy the other half of a pair of historic attached homes in leafy Williston. Now in her 70s, Delia appears to live here alone, or in her small French apartment, while Tom makes only rare visits.
The older woman's charm and privacy intrigue Meri, and when asked to house-sit, she finds herself crossing boundaries, exploring Delia's study, reading her private correspondence. This breach of trust echoes much larger ones that come to light via Meri's snooping, and also prefigures one to follow.
It turns out that the Naughton marriage has been a sequence of transgressions, of affairs pursued by Tom, who, good guy or not, seems incapable of fidelity or keeping his word. Delia had put the first heartbreaking betrayal behind her, but over time, and after one particularly hurtful liaison, came to realize she would have to break away. Yet the two have remained not just married but also lovers, their relationship a bespoke arrangement known and understood only by them. So when Tom is felled by a stroke, Delia barely hesitates before taking him - damaged and dependent - fully back into her life. The novel takes place in the early 1990s, the beginning of the Clinton era, another long story of marital accommodation. Delia's choices may not, after all, be so exceptional. And let's not forget her advice to Meri: Life teaches you that you can endure anything. After all, isn't that what must be done with things that cannot be changed?
"The Senator's Wife" delivers two differently flawed accounts of the state of wifehood in such a seamless form that the novel's bleakness registers only slowly and late. Delia's all-consuming union ends badly, and Miller's favored themes of transgression and forgiveness here seem overshadowed by ineradicable streaks of resolute, atavistic need.
From a coda set some 14 years later, we learn that Meri's more prosaic marriage to Nathan produced a very different result. From Meri's perspective the destruction next door served as an unfortunate lesson in her own progression along the marital learning curve. Seemingly wedlock, like death, is a subject that cannot be learned except through personal experience. And all manner of things are permissible, in the name of love.
Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City.
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