The Senator's Wife (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Sue Miller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sue MillerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0307276694
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Senator's Wife (Vintage Contemporaries)
Book Review: What lies beneath?
Summary: 5 Stars
The Senator himself, in "The Senator's Wife" by Sue Miller, is a magical kind of character, a most charming and attractive guy, beguiling even. Personable, affable, and able to persuade voters to send him two terms to the House, followed by two terms to the Senate. The personality that made him that way is not hard to imagine: he looked at you straight, he was sincere, upbeat, handsome, and spoke intelligently. In reading Miller's book, you will find that additionally the Senator conveyed a special personal quality to those he met: they felt better about themselves from having been with him and from seeing and hearing him. Yet he had a flaw, and he admitted it: he couldn't resist the ladies. He was successful with them, and all his life had had a train of innumerable affairs.
Tom Naughton, the Senator -- allow me not to resist the temptation to call him Tom the Naughty -- though now old and retired as the story opens in 1993, was still active in advisory and consultative capacities in Washington. His wife Delia, seventy-four years old, has held down their upscale duplex townhouse for thirty years in the New England state of his official residence. To his wife he admitted his illicit affairs, always begging her not to leave him, professing his continuing love for her. You couldn't exactly say that she took him back, for she never really let him go. She never stopped loving him and had long ago determined to stay with him, unfailingly. Of necessity he returns to the state to maintain contact with his constituency. He always asks her to stand next to him in important public appearances and especially during campaigning. Otherwise, Tom was rarely around. They had led separate private lives. To overcome her loneliness, Delia had bought and periodically returned to live in her special apartment in Paris, which she loved and where she studied the language, cooking, and felt at home with the people.
The year 1993 brings the change of a newly married young couple moving into the other half of the Naughtons' New England townhouse. Nathan, the husband, is an academic who has been offered a tenure-track position in political science and history, which is what he had been working at to get, on the faculty of a good college in the East. He also spends late hours working on his book. So he and his wife, Meri, have moved there from their small Illinois apartment, although Meri is not completely happy with the change. She will miss her interesting work and happy camaraderie on the local alumni magazine. The cross-country move is for Nathan's career, the idea is his (his "big fat idea"), and she resents it to a degree. Nor does she like that Nathan is a rather controlling person. Some of the money for the move into the house comes from Nathan's mother. Meri comes from no money. When Nathan hears that their adjacent homeowner is the former Tom Naughton, he is doubly pleased, since he has long been among the many fans of the Senator.
Meri, at thirty-seven a generation younger than Delia, becomes acquainted and likes her. As it happens, the time is a only few weeks before Delia's twice annual sojourn back to her Paris apartment. Delia naturally and easily asks Meri to do her the favor of looking after the townhouse while she is away, and Meri agrees. Meri is absorbed by everything there -- the revealing pictures on the walls, the different layout and colors of that side of the house -- and soon finds herself sneakily looking into the filed letters that Meri and Tom had written to each other over the years. Of course, she feels guilty about her invasion of their privacy, but is intrigued and resolves never to tell anyone. There are other little bits that we find out about Meri's daring personality.
Sue Miller follows Meri and Nathan as they build their family. (As an aside, I must say that one would be hard put to find a more intense description of Meri's first labor and delivery; severe as it is, it is not be missed.) Meri's family grows to include two more children, and the years pass to 2007. Retrospectively, Miller looks also at the early days and growth of the Naughton family, eventually leading to their grown children's reactions to their father's dalliances. Sue Miller's writing is fully engaging, spritely, and intelligent.
A major theme of Sue Miller's book might -- too easily and too clichéd, I would add -- be said to be the persistence of love despite whatever comes. "Omnia vincit amor." Yet Miller is not going to stop there. She challenges to the limit. Is it possible that even Delia in the largeness of her disposition and her lifetime commitment to Tom, and in an emotionally tense moment, that she would fail to see beneath a seeming wrong, fail ultimately to see a real and profound and lasting good that was there and that would perhaps be illuminative of an entire senatorial career? Can there ever be a higher moral calculus? Or does one rationalize? The story is mind expanding and well worth the reading. One caveat: though touching and often humorous, there are graphic descriptions of intimacy, and the language is direct.
Summary of The Senator's Wife (Vintage Contemporaries)
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?wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton?is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Tom's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. Soon Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, as they both reckon with the contours and mysteries of marriage: one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun. With precision and a rich vitality, Sue Miller?beloved and bestselling author of While I Was Gone?brings us a highly charged, superlative novel about marriage and forgiveness.Domestic Life Books
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