While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)
by Sue Miller

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Book Reviews of While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)

Book Review: challenged by simple moral questions
Summary: 2 Stars

The dust jacket of the book actually claims the following:

While I Was Gone is an exquisitely suspenseful novel about how quickly a marriage can be destroyed, how a good wife can find herself placing all she holds dear at risk. In expert strokes, Sue Miller captures the precariousness of even the strongest ties, the ease with which we abandon each other, and our need to be forgiven.

Huh? That's not the book that's contained within the jacket. Jo is a horrible wife, mother, friend, daughter and person. Her life is a stack of lies and she's an impulsive, thrill seeking cretin. I don't know which was the most annoying moment in the book--the two bailouts in her first marriage, the initial dalliance with an employee, the attempt to cheat on Daniel with Eli or the horrifying moment when she announces her jealousy of her daughter's scrumping in the back of a van while the rest of the band watched. Actually, I'm pretty sure that last one is the worst.

The level of sustained delusion that Jo achieves during her narrative has to make one question her sanity. The saccharin 60's flashback to the Cambridge commune is especially, though unintentionally, hilarious. Through the mists of memory she sees this as her golden moment, when she was free & in love with everyone & everything, but especially with Dana. Who, by the way, she had never even told her real name or shared her true life story with. I mean c'mon.

This is a book that cries for the tiger to be let out of the cage. Someone, Daniel or Eli or Jo needed to just go gothic and start whacking people left and right. As is, we have the ridiculous wrap up where the police decide not to look into this matter, Eli & Jo decide to coexist & Daniel comes crawling back like a whipped cur.

Finally, let me just say that I fear for a nation where it's treated as a great moral dilemma when someone has to decide whether to report that they have information about a murder. (David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedar used this device too, only there the character could exonerate a suspect.) Here's a little rule of thumb, if you considered someone a friend, you're sort of obligated to let the police know that you know who murdered her, okay?

Ms Miller seems to be particularly challenged by these rather simple moral questions. As I recall, her book The Good Mother, depended on our sharing her sense of injustice that a Father tried regaining custody of his daughter merely because the mother's boyfriend engaged in questionable sexual behavior with her. Hello?

GRADE: D

Summary of While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)

Now this unhappy era returns in the person of Eli Mayhew, who had been the odd man out in Jo's boho household. His appearance is both tantalizing and upsetting: "Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and then I told Beattie to go home, that I'd close up.... I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine surgeries for Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended." Sue Miller's fine novel is a penetrating--and sensuous--portrait of a woman besieged by her conscience. While I Was Gone also demonstrates that in the face of distance and betrayal, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing indeed. --Winnie Wheaton

Literary Books

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