The Senator's Wife

Sue Miller once again sharply defines a powerful tale of women, marriage, and the challenges of motherhood and impending age. Meri, newly married, pregnant, and naive, moves into a New England townhouse shared by Delia Naughton, wife of Senator Tom Naughton. This accidental proximity provides a rich fascination for Meri as she explores the complexity of the couple's bond. Meri contrasts Delia's compromises with her own marriage and begins to notice striking parallels. Miller's precision in the use of metaphor, introspection, and emotion is wed by Blair Brown's vocalizations into a most compelling fusion. Brown's expression of the more mature Delia is reminiscent of the imperious intonations of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she also accurately captures the slurred and halting speech of a stroke victim. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

November 5, 2007
Bestselling author Miller (The Good Mother
; When I Was Gone
) returns with a rich, emotionally urgent novel of two women at opposite stages of life who face parallel dilemmas. Meri, the young, sexy wife of a charismatic professor, occupies one wing of a New England house with her husband. An unexpected pregnancy forces her to reassess her marriage and her childhood of neglect. Delia, her elegant neighbor in the opposite wing, is the long-suffering wife of a notoriously philandering retired senator. The couple have stayed together for his career and still share an occasional, deeply intense tryst. The women's routines continue on either side of the wall that divides their homes, and the two begin to flit back and forth across the porch and into each others physical and psychological spaces. A steady tension builds to a bruising denouement. The clash, predicated on Delia's husband's compulsive behavior and on Meri's lack of boundaries, feels too preordained. But Miller's incisive portrait of the complex inner lives of her characters and her sharp manner of taking them through conflicts make for an intense read.