The Senator's Wife
by Sue Miller (Knopf, ISBN 9780307264206, $24.95)
Novelist Sue Miller
has never shied away from exposing the base aspect of her characters. In
The Good Mother, she shows a woman challenged in a child custody case;
Lost in the Forest finds an adult woman considering her compromised
adolescence. Now, in her newest novel, The Senator’s Wife, Miller
investigates marriages and secrets by delving deep into the private lives of
two women: one a newlywed, the other in a mature marriage.
The older senator’s
wife has created an entire life apart from her philandering husband: she
lives part of the year in an apartment in Paris and stateside in a condo far
from the halls of power and the beautiful younger women of Washington D.C.
The younger wife, a producer for NPR, is desperate to find comfort with her
ambitious new husband and their new baby. The two women bond in their mutual
caring and their similar capacities for self-control.
In the hands of
another novelist, The Senator’s Wife would be sewn up in a tidy
bundle, but Miller insists that we carry on many persistent questions about
married love and married secrets.
Review by
Sarah Bagby,
April 17, 2008
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