The Senator's Wife (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Sue Miller

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTELLER - The New York Times bestselling author of Monogomy brings us a "tasteful, elegant, sensuous" (The Boston Globe) novel about marriage and forgiveness.Meri is newly married,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307276694
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

Very good read!

I find Sue Miller to be a gifted writer whose elegance of phrasing and story development is consistently brilliant. This book was, for me, a delight to read and very much in keeping with that standard. In reading some of the reviews, one would think that the standard for a worthy book should include the development of only highly evolved, heroic characters. I found the main characters in this book to be deeply flawed but compassionately drawn...and realistic. I found Delia to be a compelling character whose inner life was beautifully explored for the reader in these pages. Real women ARE like Delia! Some struggle and attach in ways that are not always politically correct (pardon the pun). I love the way Sue Miller writes dialogue: efficient and real. One feels as though present to an actual conversation. In this book I found that I marked at least ten pages which contained lines which deeply touched me and I found beautiful....for instance, when Delia watches her grown son, Evan, during a brief visit home: "And yet the love she felt for him was unchanged, was based on who he'd been and who he still was to her. This is how it is with your children, she thought. You hold all the versions of them there ever were simultaneously in your heart." I loved this book. I thank Sue Miller for the visit into another woman's life via such beautiful craft and skill in writing.

A compelling story of compulsion

I can't help thinking this book is not about whether we like, admire, or forgive its flawed characters but whether we can muster compassion for their compulsions and denial. This, to me, makes it far richer and more intriguing than some morality play. I was never (like the Washington Post reviewer) disgusted by anyone in this book--appalled, perhaps, and certainly upset, but always fascinated. These are profoundly complex people. Given that, we can't expect to know or understand them fully, any more than we can get all the way to the bottom of the real people in our real lives, including ourselves. If we don't try, though, we're in for trouble. Sue Miller alludes to her characters' complexities scene by scene, memory by memory, but she doesn't tell us all that much because--I believe--she wants us to puzzle them out as best we can. She gives us clues as to their unlikeable qualities and seemingly mad actions, because these have the power to engage a reader more effectively than any easy map of their psyches could do. We're left to wonder: Why would Delia stick with Tom for one second after his worst betrayal? My best guess is that she can no more stop herself than Tom can stop chasing women. The question is whether her compulsion is based in love, need, or some barely knowable, subterranean mix of sexual desire and pyschological motive. Maybe she wants to "fix" Tom by showing him how much better she is, and their connection is, than his shallower triumphs can possibly be. Maybe she wants to show him that he can't bring her down to his level through jealousy. Maybe she just wants to remind him, every now and then, of what he might have lost completely if not for her generosity. We might find it easier to "solve" the mystery of Delia if we knew more about Tom--more about why she can't entirely let go of him--but he remains beyond our reach. I'm quite sure this was intentional on Miller's part. We don't need to know why Delia is so attached to Tom, only that the attachment is more powerful than she is herself. Miller wisely allows us see deeply into just two characters--Delia and Meri, the two who so radically alter each other's lives through their natures, their denial, and their secrets. Meri, the close neighbor (very close, separated only by a wall through which Delia can hear the sounds of sex and fighting and celebrating and crying) is just as complicated as Delia, though the answers in her case seem a little easier to parse. She's young. Her contradictory parts have had less time to deepen, to act upon each other, to shape her and to show her how intextricably connected she is to every life she touches. Meri is miserable with her pregnancy because she's terrified of what it will show her and how it will change her. She herself wasn't loved as a child, so perhaps she won't be able to love her own baby. The one thing she has ever been entirely confident about is her beautiful, sexy body (her appearance, in other words, not her reality) and n

The Master of My Own Destiny?

I was surprised to read the review by Connie Schultz, the wife of a senator, who said "There are so many assumptions about marriages like mine. What might Miller's be?" Miller does not write about events; she writes about our responses to events. Miller does not tell us what we should do; she merely tells us what she thinks someone might do. The measure of Miller's talent is not in whether or not she reflects who you or I are, but in her ability to illuminate human behavior. And if her illumination is full and bright, we might actually see something from which we can learn. I think "The Senator's Wife" is one of the best of Miller's works, challenged only by "Lost in the Forest." The first event of the book is the purchasing of half of a duplex by Meri and her husband Nathan. The other half is owned by Senator Tom Naughton and his wife Delia. We quickly learn that Nathan is controlled and controlling, Meri is unsure of the marriage or her direction in life. From Meri;s point-of-view we first are introduced to Delia Naughton, the perfect senator's wife. What we see in this section is the readjustment of the lives of Meri, Nathan, and Delia to the presence of one another. There are the little things like the awareness each household has of the other on the other side of the dividing wall. There is the relative importance (iconic and emotional) that each person has in the psyche of the others. And even the absent senator, Tom, becomes a presence in the course of the story. It is no spoiler to say that Tom is a philanderer; this is made clear early on. Nor is the story really about Tom. Nowhere is his charisma shown except in the response of a few characters to him. Tom is who Tom is -- and that is core to the story. It is how the others see him, accept their own perceptions or reject them, respond both intellectually and emotionally to who Tom is that illuminates who they are. It is disappointing that Connie Schultz and so many readers measure the book against their own experiences. For myself, the book was an experience. The characters were in essence true to themselves, including the very human condition of not always really knowing themselves or responding the way they (and we) thought they would respond. Certainly there is no harm in a reader asking him- or herself "would I do that?" But when the answer is "no", the next questions should be "would anyone do that" and "why would they do that." Miller plays fair with her answers to those questions. The question most people will probably focus on is, would anyone act like Delia after she is forced to acknowledge her husband's infidelity? To me, Delia was absolutely consistent as a character. And part of that consistency was her own failure to completely understand her own emotions or her motivations. The event that leads to this insight on the part of the reader (although not completely on the part of Delia) is the only really contrived event of the book. It is contrive

Excellent exploration of two marriages

I have seen a lot of critical reviews of this book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It tells the story of two marriages, mostly through the minds of the two wives. The older woman, the senator's wife of the title, has put up with a great deal from her husband, a la Hillary Clinton, but she's done it with her eyes open and has exacted her own forms of payback. The other wife, Meri, is younger and gets pregnant during the course of the book. She has many doubts about the pregnancy and about her marriage, which Miller explores with honesty and wit. I won't give away the dramatic climax but will just say I thought this book was well worth reading for anyone who likes to delve beneath the surface of modern marriage. I read it on my Kindle in a couple of days.

Just Keep Reading

When I was through about one quarter of the book, I thought this was another flat, shallow tale of two women who are coping with two virile men. The older woman, Delia, is the Senator's wife, and mother of three children, who has lived through her husband's heart wrenching affairs. The younger woman is Meri, a college-educated woman from an unloving background who marries a handsome, aggressive professor. As the plot expands, Sue Miller becomes the writer I have always admired. She fleshes out these two women and places them in situations motivating them to step forward and make life-changing decisions. The women, despite their ages, blend well into the plot and the settings. There are scenes in the book that are the most vivid descriptions I have ever read. Meri's labor and delivery of her son, Asa, will affect any woman with the shock of the pain, the length of the labor and the minute by minute severity of contractions. I could feel her humiliation and exquisite pain she endured. I have read childbirth descriptions but not like this. Delia is the dignified, perfect wife who has devoted her life to making her husband happy. She is sacrificial to the very end. She is at times a remarkable woman and at other times, a woman with little pride. As usual, Sue Miller's women are clear and whether we like them or not, we surely understand them, even Delia's daughter Nancy who is as inflexible as her mother is flexible. Without giving away the shocking ending, be assured that you will learn what happens to these women and how they play out the rest of their lives. I'm glad I read every page.