Rating  - what a read
This book is still haunting me, several weeks later. Yes, Sue Miller is minutely detailed and exhaustive but it really pays off. I actually experienced a revelation while being completely entertained, which is a rare thing. This is, I will hazard, a profound book. I didn't want it to end.
Rating  - All the wrong reasons (Spoiler Alert)
I read this book for the worst possible reason. I saw a review of it in Entertainment Weekly that made a big deal about some "shocking" sex scene in it and was so intrigued that I got the book from the library and spent the entire time I was reading it waiting for this one scene. Of course, it was a let down. Not only that, but the interminable time spent leading up to that disappointing scene was wasted on a meanadering, nearly plot-less story of two unlikable women and their petty marital and pregnancy problems. Meri is a 36-year-old newlywed first-time mother who spends most of the book snooping on her neighbor and whining about how pregnancy is changing her body. Um . . . duh? Her neighbor is Delia Naughton, the elderly wife of a philandering former senator who should have left her husband decades ago and didn't have enough self-respect to do it. Eventually Meri does something "naughty" with the senator (queue the not remotely shocking "sex" scene) and destroys the friendship she had with Delia, but the book leads up to this moment as if it were D-Day when in fact it's just another boring moment in an intensely boring book.
This is the first book I've read by Sue Miller and it will absolutely be the last. The trials and tribulations of housewives hold little interest for me, and I can't imagine why anyone else would be interested either, so I definitlely don't recommend this book.
Rating  - Compelling, but disappointing
Sue Miller is always a compelling read, and this is no exception. The Senator's wife's devotion to him, despite his infidelities,is believable and sad. What disturbed me greatly was Meri's absolute cruelty at the end of the novel and her own belief that what she did, she did out of love. That is a comment on the ability some women have to lie to themselves about their own lust, labeling it as love. Meri is a thoroughly dispicable character, almost as bad as the self-centered Senator. Delia is the hero of this story and,sadly, its biggest victim.
Rating  - "I did it for love", she said.... Unsatisfying Ending Ruins Book
Source for the quote above? Hint: not the wife, nor her philandering husband.
I finished listening to this book on CD this afternoon and I've been thinking about it since, and not in a warm fuzzy way.
I was truly disappointed that in the end, Meri expressed no remorse for her part in the wreakage of two elderly lives. She in fact comes across as nearly psychopathic in her narcissism. Throughout the book she lies to those around her and acts in ways that are self-serving.
What is the author's point in providing this ending? Yes, I understand the perspective re: the husband, a philandering husband will never change his ways, even at the age of 70.
But what is her point re: Meri??? That narcissitic people can serve themselves without consequence?
That's the message I got out of it.
But why would Sue Miller want to leave us with such an unsatisfying message?
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