Independence Day has an ironic tang in Pomeroy, New Hampshire, the setting of Sue Miller’s 11th novel. The Fourth of July tea marks the return of the summer people, well-heeled city migrants who like to lord it over the all-year townspeople.
This grand event is “where you started the flirtations that shifted and shifted again over the following two months”. But 1998 is a year of disillusionment, America more gripped by the Monica Lewinsky scandal than the first al-Qaeda bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Meanwhile in Pomeroy the fragile social dance is threatened, because somebody is torching the summer people’s homes.
As tensions rise, the arsonist grows bolder, a development welcomed by local newsman Bud Jacobs – not just for the story, but because it gives him a chance to befriend Frankie Rowley, an aid worker recently returned from Kenya.
In another writer’s hands The Arsonist would be a thriller, but Miller is concerned with deeper mysteries of human motivation. Her interest centres on two women in a state of emergency. At 43, Frankie has come to realise that she is “temporising” with her life, roaming from crisis to crisis. While she tussles with culture shock at a place where “the scale of things, of people’s preoccupations, seem small”, her mother, Sylvia, struggles to make a home in her holiday residence with husband, Alfie. Both women confront their choices, held to account by memories of their vivacious summer selves.Miller has been compared to Anne Tyler, and shares her uncanny compass for the contrary currents of a human heart.
A virtuosic description of a house devoured by fire reveals the range of her talent, but she never writes for effect. Instead her subtle prose seduces with observations: the softness of a mother’s breasts yielding in a hug; the attrition of a long-haul romance, as moments that are “natural and glad and easy” grow “rarer, more and more painfully dear”.
When two characters debate whether “teensy events” constitute a “real life”, it feels as if the author is posing a similar question as to whether small-town affairs are the proper business of art. This moving novel provides a profoundly satisfying answer.
