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, Jennifer 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.)
Confronted with such earthiness — and such very deep earnestness — coupled with Delia’s and Meri’s penchant for two-bit philosophizing, I wanted to run for an exit. Or, perhaps, to run off the page with Tom Naughton, the one character who seems capable of wit and self-parody. “Do you remember when everyone thought Bush had a mistress too?” he asks in the course of a Clinton-era conversation. “But she was rumored to be someone wealthy and WASPy, of course. ... The problem here is the goddamn Democrats, who sleep down, you see. They love that white trash. ... And white trash loves publicity, so the Democrats are the ones who get into all the trouble. As opposed to the Republicans. They sleep up. ... Up, where all is Episcopalian and quiet as death itself, and no one ever has to hear a thing about it.”
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.
