The Senator's Wife

The Senator's Wife
by Sue Miller

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Book Summary Information

Author: Sue Miller
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-01-08
ISBN: 0307264203
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Knopf

Book Reviews of The Senator's Wife

Book Review: A compelling story of compulsion
Summary: 5 Stars

I can't help thinking this book is not about whether we like, admire, or forgive its flawed characters but whether we can muster compassion for their compulsions and denial. This, to me, makes it far richer and more intriguing than some morality play. I was never (like the Washington Post reviewer) disgusted by anyone in this book--appalled, perhaps, and certainly upset, but always fascinated. These are profoundly complex people. Given that, we can't expect to know or understand them fully, any more than we can get all the way to the bottom of the real people in our real lives, including ourselves. If we don't try, though, we're in for trouble.

Sue Miller alludes to her characters' complexities scene by scene, memory by memory, but she doesn't tell us all that much because--I believe--she wants us to puzzle them out as best we can. She gives us clues as to their unlikeable qualities and seemingly mad actions, because these have the power to engage a reader more effectively than any easy map of their psyches could do. We're left to wonder: Why would Delia stick with Tom for one second after his worst betrayal? My best guess is that she can no more stop herself than Tom can stop chasing women. The question is whether her compulsion is based in love, need, or some barely knowable, subterranean mix of sexual desire and pyschological motive. Maybe she wants to "fix" Tom by showing him how much better she is, and their connection is, than his shallower triumphs can possibly be. Maybe she wants to show him that he can't bring her down to his level through jealousy. Maybe she just wants to remind him, every now and then, of what he might have lost completely if not for her generosity.

We might find it easier to "solve" the mystery of Delia if we knew more about Tom--more about why she can't entirely let go of him--but he remains beyond our reach. I'm quite sure this was intentional on Miller's part. We don't need to know why Delia is so attached to Tom, only that the attachment is more powerful than she is herself. Miller wisely allows us see deeply into just two characters--Delia and Meri, the two who so radically alter each other's lives through their natures, their denial, and their secrets.

Meri, the close neighbor (very close, separated only by a wall through which Delia can hear the sounds of sex and fighting and celebrating and crying) is just as complicated as Delia, though the answers in her case seem a little easier to parse. She's young. Her contradictory parts have had less time to deepen, to act upon each other, to shape her and to show her how intextricably connected she is to every life she touches.

Meri is miserable with her pregnancy because she's terrified of what it will show her and how it will change her. She herself wasn't loved as a child, so perhaps she won't be able to love her own baby. The one thing she has ever been entirely confident about is her beautiful, sexy body (her appearance, in other words, not her reality) and now that's gone, as is her husband, pursuing his career. Meri is lonely. She is drawn to Delia largely because Delia is the opposite, in every way, from her own mother. Meri's snooping through Delia's personal life is terrible; it makes us cringe. It endangers everything she hopes for in her new friendship. It is also understandable, even inevitable, given her fears, her past, and her lonely, uncertain present. Meri, too, is compelled. She agonizes over her betrayal of Delia, but she is helpless to stop. Just like Delia, just like Tom.

So--does Miller want us to excuse these people because they can't help themselves? I don't believe that for a minute. I believe she wants us just to see them, without judging, without clouding our eyes by liking or disliking. I think she wants us to try to understand her characters, in order to see what happens when they fail to understand themselves. This is how we can learn from them. We all act against our own interests. We all hurt people we care about. Why do we do this? If we can grasp even a little about the flawed and struggling people in a novel like this one--a mindfully constructed work by a writer who is known to make purposeful, artful choices at every turn--perhaps we'll be wiser about ourselves.

From the author of Every Last Cuckoo: A Novel

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Summary of The Senator's Wife

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.

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