Product Description

Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the best-selling While I Was Gone brings her marvelous gifts to a powerful story of two unconventional women who unexpectedly change each other’s lives.

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.

Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved—the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, the superb economy of style—fused with an utterly engrossing story that has a great deal to say to women, and men, of all ages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3166 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bestselling author Miller (The Good Mother; When I Was Gone) returns with a rich, emotionally urgent novel of two women at opposite stages of life who face parallel dilemmas. Meri, the young, sexy wife of a charismatic professor, occupies one wing of a New England house with her husband. An unexpected pregnancy forces her to reassess her marriage and her childhood of neglect. Delia, her elegant neighbor in the opposite wing, is the long-suffering wife of a notoriously philandering retired senator. The couple have stayed together for his career and still share an occasional, deeply intense tryst. The women's routines continue on either side of the wall that divides their homes, and the two begin to flit back and forth across the porch and into each others physical and psychological spaces. A steady tension builds to a bruising denouement. The clash, predicated on Delia's husband's compulsive behavior and on Meri's lack of boundaries, feels too preordained. But Miller's incisive portrait of the complex inner lives of her characters and her sharp manner of taking them through conflicts make for an intense read. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Connie Schultz

It was probably inevitable that Sue Miller, a gifted storyteller, would eventually unleash her talents on the topic of political marriage. As Miller explained recently in an interview with NPR's Linda Wertheimer, she has long been intrigued by the dynamics of such marriages, particularly those in which a wife's loyalty seems to outlast her husband's worthiness. Politics breeds the sacrificial wife who abandons her dreams for those of her husband but then suffers public humiliation when the honorable member fails to keep his in his pants.

What, Miller wonders, makes these wives stay put in marriages that diminish them?

It's a good question, but it remains unanswered in an otherwise compelling tale of the marital complexities and disappointments in Miller's latest novel, The Senator's Wife.

First, a disclosure: I am a U.S. senator's wife. I am fairly new to the role, and it is neither my vocation nor occupation, but it bears mentioning. It also explains why I could not pass up the chance to read this book. There are so many assumptions about marriages like mine. What might Miller's be?

This is the tale of two marriages and how they intersect and, eventually, collide. Meri and Nathan are young and still negotiating the terrain of matrimony when they move next door to Delia Naughton. Delia is married to former U.S. senator Tom Naughton, a man who cheats on his wife so often one half-expects this tale to turn into a murder mystery.

Despite his infidelities, Delia is unwilling to sever all ties with him. They no longer live together, but she won't divorce Tom and occasionally still sleeps with him. Miller depicts their dalliances with her usual sizzle and pop, and many readers will celebrate Delia's 70-something vivacity. Still, the question hovers: Why waste her energy on him?

We are told countless times that Tom is charismatic, but Miller gives little proof of his charms. Instead, Delia just seems a fool. "She knew Tom had other women, and she told herself that every time she was thinking of him, he was thinking of someone else. Every time she wanted him, he was making love with someone else. But when she was swept with jealous longing for him, none of that mattered. She couldn't help herself. She called him."

We are given no mitigating circumstances for her continued devotion. Husband and wife do not share a commitment to any causes, nor does Delia enjoy the spotlight. We learn early that she prefers to live in small-town New England, far away from Washington.

"She supposed most of it was just getting away with Tom from the sexually charged atmosphere of Washington, where a handsome man with power, a man who talked easily, a man who was charming and chivalric around women, could always find companionship. Or, more accurately, had to actively choose not to have companionship, if that's what he wanted."

Meanwhile, Meri is struggling next door with what it means to be a grown-up. She resents the changes her husband's academic career have brought to her life, and when she accidentally becomes pregnant, she resents that, too. What, she wonders, is to become of her?

"She suspects there's trouble coming. But she feels if they can just hold on to the easy camaraderie and sexual heat of their early days, then they can find a way to keep talking about all this, a way of shaping their marriage to suit them both."

Meri is intrigued with Delia, whom she sees as "private" and "unknowable." Inexplicably, this same emotionally aloof woman hands Meri, still a virtual stranger, her house key and asks her to collect the mail and water her plants while she spends the winter in Paris. Almost immediately upon Delia's departure, Meri explores her drawers and cupboards and reads dozens of old letters that chronicle a challenging, often heartbreaking marriage.

While Delia's immediate, and misplaced, trust in Meri rings false, Miller conveys just how it is to be married to a politician who insists on holding center stage. The senator bows his head in church, wondering how many are watching. He insists on taking a cab home, rather than allowing a family member to pick him up at the airport. "He likes that solo, dramatic entrance," his son says.

"Plus, of course, there's the cabdriver," Delia answers. "One more vote to be gathered in."

Miller gets other details right, too. During campaigns, a staff member hands Delia her speech and orders her not to change a word. Every year, the annoying Christmas cards arrive, "only a few of them from what Delia thought of as real people -- the rest just politics."

One of the most devastating scenes in the book comes when Delia realizes what her husband's infidelities have cost her. She is alone in a Paris museum when she spots an erotic drawing of a nude woman splayed across a bed. In a breathtaking moment of clarity and heartbreak, she sees what her husband sees with every mistress, every affair: "The flesh, the youth, the beauty, the sex, of another woman as Tom would see her, as Tom would respond to her. The inevitability of his desire for someone else made visible." She stares at the sketch and sobs.

A final betrayal involves Meri and Tom in an implausible set of circumstances that leaves the reader disgusted with all four characters.

At story's end, one can imagine most wives shaking their heads and mumbling, "At least my marriage isn't that bad." Most real-life senators' wives would likely agree.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In her latest novel, Sue Miller contemplates wifehood from the perspective of two women—one at the start of her marriage, the other reconciled to the direction her relationship has taken over the decades yet nonetheless hopeful for change. In capturing their dreams, fears, and disappointments, Miler paints a devastating, realistic, and unsentimental portrait of both Meri and Delia. What to make of the two negative reviews? They seemed complete opposites: the Los Angeles Times enjoyed the book until the twist at the end, whereas the New York Times Book Review admired only the climax. Yes, the novel is a domestic drama, with its compare-and-contrast marriage storylines, a tone that can be overly earnest, and protagonists that sometimes lack self-awareness. But there is good insight into character here, and the story’s masterful plot twist—a final betrayal—reveals Miller’s ample talents as a storyteller.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Delia was not a martyr
Having lived and worked in Washington, I was amazed at the number of readers who thought Delia was a martyr for this self-centered senator. In fact, she was an admirable opportunist. She figured out a way to have her man, have her own relationships and have Paris! Not that this would be everyone's choice - I mean, why get/stay married at all? But for Delia, who was somehow not just loyal to this man but adored him, it was a relationship that worked. I found that Miller's recitation of Delia's most quotidian moments - the little drink in the evening, accompanied by her favorite cheeses, etc. - was compelling in that it did not paint a portrait of a woman who was depressed, lonely and resentful. It painted her as making a life. She obviously dressed well, did her hair, wore red lipstick, etc., etc., and the reference to Paris was not coincidental. Many many European women are in marriages that resemble Delia's - even if their husbands are NOT in politics. [It was also why my Italian father inculcated in me the critical importance of "always having your own money." Delia obviously had access to the Senator's money, to live a life that she might not have chosen but which seemed to make her content.

As for Meri, I thought like many other readers that she was the ultimate self-centered opportunist, and a total baby. However, she too married a self-centered man. What we don't read about explicitly - but Miller deftly suggests - is that Meri's young professor husband also has his own ego-maniac issues as evidenced in his spending way too much time on campus and always has a lot of work to do on weekends that takes him away from Meri. Hmmm, wonder what HE was up to; Miller doesn't have to say this explicitly. If a follow-up book is called "The Professor's Wife" no spouse of any college professor would be surprised: the classroom is a "target-rich" environment for extramarital dalliances, as one of my MBA classmates asserts.

Finally, like many readers I found myself wondering toward the end of the book what was the point of the continued recitation of the daily lives of these people? I forced myself late in the evening to read the last 50 pages bleary-eyed because I couldn't stand the investment anymore! When it finally came and I read the explanation for the unfortunate turn of events, I was disappointed, but I also think it totally summed up the characters, and especially the character whose thoughts we read in the end. In any event, I too did not love this book, and if the setting had in fact been Washington itself we would have had many more juicy revelations, even with Delia in the same town as her philandering husband. It happens, that's how they live there, and that's the price they pay.

"Isn't that what marriage is all about?...Staying in it while getting out in some way, too?"
These are not the words of the unfaithful senator, but of the senator's wife, Delia.

Once again Sue Miller gives us a brilliantly written novel. When one reads Sue Miller one can see, smell, hear, taste as she describes. One is in the room, in the car with the characters, seeing their expressions, listening to their conversations. Miller has an uncanny understanding of human nature in all its ineptitude and messiness, as well as, in its amazing love and courage.

This is essentially the story of two women and their marriages: Delia, the senator's wife, who separates from, yet remains lovers and friends with her philandering husband, Tom, and Meri, a thirty-seven-year-old newly-married woman who moves in next door to Delia with her husband, Nathan.

(Spoiler Alert!) Delia's inability to give up her relationship with Tom is as destructive as Tom's inability to stop being unfaithful. Tom has a stroke, and Delia thinks he is finally hers now to take care of and keep all to herself. Yet Tom is still Tom even in his mostly incapacitated state. His lifelong weakness, combined with Meri's self-centered, ego-driven willingness, prove to be both Tom and Delia's final undoing. Delia finally says enough is enough, and she retreats, a broken old woman, to her daughter, Nancy, who, like so many others, could never understand her mother's devotion to her cad of a father in the first place. Nancy promptly places Tom in a nursing home. Meri lies to her husband about what took place that made Delia leave so abruptly, gets away with lying, and essentially lives happily ever after.

Many readers disliked the book because of the ending, and because it's difficult to become fond of or to respect these characters. Certainly one would have wished, at least, for all Meri's seeming love and admiration for Delia, that she would have been incapable of that betrayal. Yet, when one thinks carefully, such an ending wouldn't be in keeping with the Meri Miller has portrayed all along. Meri has always been promiscuous, sneaky, weak, love-starved, and self-centered. She is ever Meri, as Tom is ever Tom. One is glad that Delia, at least, finally has had enough and walks out, although, sadly, she does so much too late.

Miller doesn't ask us to like her characters, or to agree with them, or to condone their choices. She simply presents them as they are and forces the reader to deal with them. This, in my view, shows a great respect for her readership, as we are left to sort out our feelings about these characters and their choices long after we've finished the book.

Stupid Ending.
I had enjoyed the writing, up until near the end of the book. Made me sorry I had wasted my time. Did the author just not know how to end the book with something plausable? It was annoying.