The Lake Shore Limited

Miller's main character, playwright Billy Gertz, creates emotions of desperation, maddening unknowns, sorrow, and guilt in her work while the real people in her life continue to grapple with inconsolable loss years after 9/11. Author Miller exquisitely constructs the juxtaposition between real-life trauma and Billy's play. As narrator, Miller performs with the expertise that arises from her intimate awareness of every nuance. The novel is structured around early readings of the protagonist's play interspersed with the internal dialogues and memories of the real-life characters. Miller's lyrical prose and well-timed narration work well to avoid any confusion between the two. THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED is an anguished metaphor for 9/11. A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

January 18, 2010
Four people are bound together by the 9/11 death of a man in Miller's insightful latest. Leslie, older sister and stand-in mother to the late Gus, clings to the notion that Gus had found true love with his girlfriend, Billy, before he was killed. But the truth is more complicated: Billy, a playwright, has written a new play that explores the agonizing hours when a family gathers, not knowing the fate of their mother and wife who was aboard a train that has been bombed. The ambivalent reaction of the woman's husband has shades of Billy and Gus's relationship, particularly the limbo she's been in since he died. Rafe, the actor playing the ambivalent husband, processes his own grief and guilt about his terminally ill wife as he steps more and more into his character. Finally, there's Sam, an old friend Leslie now hopes to set up with Billy. While the plot doesn't have the suspense and zip of The Senator's Wife
, Miller's take on post-9/11 America is fascinating and perfectly balanced with her writerly meditations on the destructiveness of trauma and loss, and the creation and experience of art.