Rating  - Unusual and sad story
This really was a very strange and sad story. it took me a while to get into the book and, initially, I had no feel whatsoever for Delia. That changed once there were chapters that focused on her, and I found myself liking her, although I could not quite "get" her. I really was unable to understand her motivation to stay in her marriage. Initially, I liked the Meri character, but over the chapters, I came to find her quite unlikeable in her narcissism and selfishness. And both Nathan and Tom felt totally elusive to me. And there seemed to be a total disconnect with the Meri at the very end in 2007.
That said, the novel had a very literary feel, and I agree with another reviewer who commented that it was reminiscent of Anne Tyler. I think this would be a worthwhile read for a book club.
Rating  - The Senator's Wife
This was my first experience with this author and my last. I hated the book. I kept asking myself why would anyone put up with a cheating lying husband for 25 years. It was so improbable to want me to beleive that a woman who hasn't lived with her husband for 20 years and has a completely separate life is still so in love with him that she takes him back once in a while to have sex, even into her 60's. What exactly is the love based on if you are not sharing the experiences of life that help grow and bond your life together. It made no sense to me. I kept asking myself why is she staying married I don't see the love between them, only betrayal and lies. Meri's character was so whiny, disloyal and unpleasant I was hoping her husband would just leave her. I didn't see anything about her that was ever happy and she was a devious liar. The ending floored me and made me sick. It was thoroughly depressing. After ruining the lives of two elderly people Meri ends up the happy one with the husband and childern. I guess in this case it pays to be selfish,bitchy, sneaky, and untrustworthy.
Rating  - Characters are complex, not evil
Unlike many readers, I found the ending merely sad, not shocking or a sign of Meri's moral bankruptcy. Meri is far from perfect, and what she does at the end is clearly not noble or ethical. But she has lacked love all her life -- her husband seems too self-absorbed to love her -- and she honestly believes that she did it for love. It is sad that such a gesture can cause such harm, but it did, and Meri will have to live with the consequences.
Sue Miller knows how to delineate characters and how to write dialogue. But she has a very annoying, constant writer's habit -- what I would call the fading-away comma phrase. Just in the online excerpt, we see: "this is a coup, an achievement," "the profiles, the three-quarter angles," "a great change, a beginning," "they can find a way to keep talking about all this, a way of shaping their marriage to suit them both." Those last phrases trail away and make the sentences seem precious and affected. On occasion, it's fine, but Miller does it constantly. What about, for example, "the profiles and the three-quarter angles." Or what does "an achievement" add that was not already present in "a coup"?
Rating - A big disappointment
To keep it brief: I read this book because I liked While I Was Gone, also by Sue Miller. Though the heroine of the that book was unlikable, the story was good and rather well-written.
Sue Miller seems to have slipped several notches in the interim. The prose in The Senator's Wife is straight out of Writing 101, with conversations unremittingly punctuated by inane asides: "She took a sip of beer" or "He cut the pizza and put it on her plate." There was also a lot of meaningless detail that served no purpose.
The older heroine is a one-dimensional stereotype of an old lady. The senator husband is worse, maybe half-dimensional. But the worst thing about this book was the young heroine, an utterly amoral piece of work whom the author seems to like and believe moral. Either Sue Miller is off her nut or she's pulling our leg.
I don't recommend it at all.
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