Sue Miller
publisher
Knopf
format
Hardcover
pages
288
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED, Sue Miller's new novel, is vintage Miller, a what a relief! I've been yearning for another THE GOOD MOTHER, AND Miller has come through! The characters are so real that it's startling to close the book on them at the end. Don't read this if you're looking for innovative fictional technique, elaborate sentences, or elaborate metaphors - but for surgical accuracy in how our choices in the world express who we've become and how honest we are with ourselves.
Imagine that your relationship is failing. Your spouse or partner loves you but you need out urgently. However, before you can extricate yourself, he or she boards an airplane for a routine trip - and that plane crashes into to World Trade Center. (Don't roll your eyes-keep going!) Everyone grieves with you and honors you, but your feelings are complicated. If this book is about the aftermath of 9/11, it's one that encourages us to look beyond easy emotions to more complex moral questions.
Biography
Since her iconic first novel, The Good Mother in 1986, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters.
While not strictly speaking autobiographical, Miller's fiction is, nonetheless, shaped by her experiences. Born into an academic and ecclesiastical family, she grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park and went to college at Harvard. She was married at 20 and held down a series of odd jobs until her son Ben was born in 1968. She separated from her first husband in 1971, subsequently divorced, and for 13 years was a single parent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working in day care, taking in roomers, and writing whenever she could.
In these early years, Miller's productivity was directly proportional to her ability to win grants and fellowships. An endowment in 1979 allowed her to enroll in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. A few of her stories were accepted for publication, and she began teaching in the Boston area. Two additional grants in the 1980s enabled her to concentrate on writing fulltime. Published in 1986, her first novel became an international bestseller.
Since then, success has followed success. Two of Miller's books (The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbots) have been made into feature films; her 1990 novel Family Pictures was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Oprah Winfrey selected While I Was Gone for her popular Book Club; and in 2004, a first foray into nonfiction -- the poignant, intensely personal memoir The Story of My Father -- was widely praised for its narrative eloquence and character dramatization.
Miller is a distinguished practitioner of "domestic fiction," a time-honored genre stretching back to Jane Austen, Henry James, and Leo Tolstoy and honed to perfection by such modern literary luminaries as John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, and Richard Ford. A careful observer of quotidian detail, she stretches her novels across the canvas of home and hearth, creating extraordinary stories out of the quiet intimacies of marriage, family, and friendship. In an article written for the New York Times "Writers on Writing" series, she explains: "For me everyday life in the hands of a fine writer seems ... charged with meaning. When I write, I want to bring a sense of that charge, that meaning, to what may fairly be called the domestic."
Beyond the book
'The Lake Shore Limited' by Sue Miller
The author of 'The Senator's Wife' explores the dynamics of friendship among a group of damaged baby boomers who, against the backdrop of 9/11, struggle to rise above the ashes.
LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW
April 06, 2010|By Julia M. Klein
An elegant precision informs Sue Miller's fiction, a craft that serves as container and counterpoint to the messy lives and relationships at the core of her work.
Miller's ninth novel, "The Lake Shore Limited," belongs to the burgeoning genre of Sept. 11 literature: books that share an interest in grief and social dislocation. But the backdrop here isn't simply one colossal day of destruction.
Miller's baby-boomer characters have traversed a long arc of disappointment, from the youthful idealism of the 1970s to the compromises of middle age. Instead of politics itself, Miller has taken as her subject the politics of relationships and the human-scale disasters that flawed men and women inflict on one another.
"The Lake Shore Limited" refers to a train, and the title doubles as that of a play in the book. The novel's dominant metaphor -- impossible to miss -- is the equation of life with theater. Miller's characters move around their homes as if on stage sets, playing roles that chafe at times but also guard them from emotional danger. Most guarded of all is Billy, a playwright who aggressively channels her conflicted feelings into her work.
Billy's life is rife with poses and evasions. She adores a dog given to her by her lover, Gus, but can never quite give herself over to the man himself -- despite his charm, sexual skill and the fact that his older sister, Leslie, has become her good friend.
Struggling with guilt and awkwardness, Billy decides she must move out of Gus' apartment and end the relationship.
Before she can tell him, though, Gus' plane hits the World Trade Center. It's a tragedy but also, possibly, a relief. On the way to his memorial service, Billy worries about having to feign a grief deeper than she feels. "It would begin now, her performance," she thinks.
Miller's writing also calls attention to itself as a performance, though not in a flashy, postmodern way. The craft is more severe than that. Her prose style is economical, only occasionally reaching for lyricism. But the third-person narration uses both flashbacks and multiple perspectives, circling around the incidents at the center of the book.
We see the action from the viewpoints of four different characters, two men and two women. Each part of the novel chronologically overlaps, before moving ahead. It's not exactly "Rashomon," but the device underlines the mysteries that separate and confound even close friends and lovers.