Customer Reviews

Lost in the Forest

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

First, this confession: it was the beautiful cover of this book that first caught my eye. If ever a book was served by what lies on its cover, it is this one.

Set in the California wine country in the late 1980's, this Sue Miller novel begins in straightforward fashion with the accidental death of a man, then lets the effects of that death cascade downward to set the entire story in motion. This novel tells of fifteen-year-old Daisy and her extended family, and how the life of Daisy and her relatives is changed with the loss of Daisy's stepfather. Ill-healed wounds from the recent past are split open once more amid a plethora of present-day anguish. Daisy and all around her are, to state it simply, changed.

If Lost In The Forest were merely this, it would be an entirely different type of novel, but as most everyone now knows, Miller turns it into something more. What she accomplishes via Daisy's eventual erotic affair with a man nearly forty years her elder, is to explicitly turn out the most daring, taboo-breaking work of fiction since Lolita half a century ago. I avidly followed along behind Daisy in her descent into what is probably best described, even in 2005, as a plummet from grace.

I really feel uncomfortable saying more than this, because there is much lying under the surface of this work and I am afraid of giving details away when you can gain so much more by discovering this story for yourself. What I will conclude with here is that Miller, in this tale of pain and reaction, coming of age, and the making of mistakes, has given us her best work since Family Pictures, and showed not only courage in the story she created, but in making this barely more than a novella, when so many other writers might have yielded to the temptation to bloat this by an unnecessary couple hundred extra pages.

Time after time, Sue Miller has proven herself a master storyteller, reaching into the heart of a tale and exposing the complicated reactions of a family in crisis. As in Lost in the Forest, no one is ever prepared for tragedy, yet it strikes randomly, altering lives in the wake of grief.

For Eva and her three children, tragedy strikes on a quiet afternoon walk with her second husband, John, and their small son, Theo. John is suddenly struck by a car, killed instantly in front of wife and child. Mark, Eva's first husband, receives a call from seventeen-year old Emily, requesting that he come and get the children, but she doesn't tell him the reason until after they are safely ensconced at his house. Three-year old Theo may be too young to understand, but middle child, almost-fifteen-year old Daisy was particularly close to her stepfather, a gentle man who took the time to attend to her emotional needs. Eva is, of course devastated.

Family and friends grope blindly through the following days in the beautiful Napa Valley wine country of the 1980's, seeking a return to some kind of normalcy and an end to their endless grief, the weight of sorrow almost a physical burden. Time passes and the family returns to a routine, but, of course, nothing is the same for any of them. Over the next few months, Mark imagines a life again with his former wife, although Eva is ambivalent, still reeling from the shocking loss of her beloved John. Aware of Eva's dilemma, Mark can't deny the fantasy that blooms in his imagination.

Emily has begun to move away from the circle of family. The world calls her to her future. Young Theo has yet to comprehend that his father has gone forever, imagining he will see him in heaven soon. Surprisingly, it is Daisy, now fifteen, who suffers the most from John`s absence, the man who had so generously taken over the fatherly role Mark unwittingly abdicated. Given to a natural quiet and isolation, the formerly gawky girl is growing into her beauty, a fact that doesn't go unnoticed by one of their circle, an older married man.

Like moth to flame, the vulnerable Daisy is seduced by the probing voice of experience, the worldly man who finds her so charming, so vulnerable. Open to his flattery, Daisy is transported into a private island of intimacy, an almost physical yearning like a healing balm for the almost fathomless grief she has endured since John's death. The terrible loss too large for her to manage, Daisy escapes into her romantic musings, stepping over the threshold of sexual maturity, still a girl but with the sensory awareness of a woman, unable to locate a moral compass for her burgeoning emotions.

Miller handles the scenes of seduction with incredible grace, perfectly capturing Daisy's innocence, vulnerability and desperate need for comfort; the author's descriptions are weighted with poignancy, a melding of curiosity and satisfaction: "She felt he offered her a new version of herself, one she carried more and more with her into real life." It is Mark and Eva's courage as parents that serves as a catalyst for Daisy's decisions about her relationship with the older man, who is actually a predator, as she will come to see years later. And it is Mark, Daisy's absentee father, who reaches out to his troubled daughter, offering her a healthy future and the promise of her youth.

From a tangled web of emotional chaos, Miller creates a family in crisis who must learn to recover, adapt and make peace with the unalterable past, anchored by the overwhelming love of parent for child and the gift of forgiveness. Luan Gaines/2005.

IMHO, this is one of Miller's better books. The characters are all ring true, and the tale is told in an interesting way.

Summary, no spoilers:

Eva and Mark had two children, named Emily and Daisy. When the girls were small, Mark has an affair, and the marriage ends.

Eva remarries John ("a nice guy"), and has a son, Theo, with him.

When the book opens, we discover that John has been killed in a car accident (he was a pedestrian), and everyone is feeling enormous grief.

The book tells the story of that grief, and how each character deals with life without John.

Mark now becomes a more vital part of the family's life, Eva deals with loneliness, and Daisy, 14 years old and the most troubled, deals with her grief, her alienation from other kids, and her burgeoning sexuality.

This is a quick read. As usual, Miller is entertaining, and in particular, in this novel she has created a realistic group of characters.

The only reservation I have is with the ending of this book. Miller's last chapter takes place well after the events of the book, and it does resolve a lot of questions as to what happens to the various characters. It is just my opinion, but I would have preferred a different ending. It was a bit of a letdown for me, and I felt like I was meeting different characters than the ones I had come to know intimately throughout the novel.

Despite this, Lost in the Forest is a very good book, and I highly recommended it.

SPOILER ALERT!!

This book was well written, as all Sue Miller's books are. It had interesting (but not terrbly appealing) characters, and great, realistic dialogue, but it contained highly disturbing and erotically written sex scenes between a lonely, hard edged teenaged girl and a completely narcissistic, sleazy older man that left me quite queasy. To me this was sexual abuse, but it was never defined that way. All in all the book left me with an empty feeling, despite the girl's father more or less stepping up to the protective plate.

Regarding Mark's discovery of his 15 yr. old daughter's relationship with a 53 year old man:

Yes, the relationship is repulsive and hard to read about. We are forced to open our eyes to something that we know as a society does happen: many atrractive young girls do become the objects of older mens' fantasies and sexual attentions. We know wihtout even thiking about it that the typical response would be that most fathers blow up and reject their daughters in response to having knowledge of such acts.

Although Miller makes Mark's response different, it is not unrealistic in the context of the rest of the storyline. Mark's response is inextricably linked to his ongoing relationship with Eva. As both Emily and Daisy state toward the end of the book, the children's lives were shaped/marred by their "exclusion" from the intimacy that their parents shared. Because Mark still loved her, his first instincts would have been to protect EVA from the knowledge of what happened to their daughter. He knew fully that with all Eva had lost and suffered that this would crush her.

Fortunately for Daisy, over the years, Mark had come to realize his culpability in being an absent father while married, his replacement by John in both Eva's and Daisy's hearts, and even after the loss of his "replacement" through the death of Daisy's step-father. Daisy would not continue to be lost to him, however; she called out to him by crying in the night -- a few days later, he heard her cry in a different way and came to her aid becoming the father she desperately wanted and needed.

Young girls like Daisy do reach out to older/other men when their fathers are absent or have died. The men they find available to them may have other objectives, yet seem to fill a void and shape too many young girls lives. I think Sue Miller successfully addressed a very thorny subject on so many levels that a second reading would intensify an understanding of the strength of her words and message to us as a society.

Brilliant novel, readable and delightful. It's also scary as all hell in that it starts with a bang with the death of a husband and parent. This is so well rendered by Miller that I had hairs standing up on my arms and the most lothesome sense of dread anchoring my arms and legs into immobility. I don't think I could have moved at the time I read that part of the book.

The novel is set in wine-infested Napa of the 80's. The lives lived against that backdrop tear apart the characters ... and the reader. There is perfection in this novel and it fairly shines; the stories are exquisite, important. In the end, though, Miller lets the stories fall away from a central gravity into a shattered kind of foretelling. Sadly, this novel falls apart at the end.

This is the first of Miller's books I've read, but it won't be the last. It's a "family" novel but the characterization is complex and the motivations entirely believable. Mark is a vineyard manager in the Napa Valley of northern California who screwed up and lost his wife in a divorce -- a loss he's never reconciled himself to. Especially difficult is the day-to-day separation from his two daughters, whom he adored when they were little but whom he doesn't really understand now that they've entered adolescence. Eva, his ex-wife, remarried to a "nice man" she loved devotedly, but who, as the book opens, has just been killed by a reckless driver in front of his wife and their young son. Meanwhile, Emily, the eldest daughter ("the pretty one"), is about to graduate from high school, looking toward a separate life out in the world, while Daisy, tall and gawky and nerdish, and in love with her stepfather, is now somehow estranged from her perfect sister and is feeling more and more alone -- lost in the forest of growing up. Daisy has her own ways of trying to resolve her loneliness and neediness without admitting to either of them, while Eva tries to come to terms with her husband's death, and Mark begins to wonder if he can gradually regain his lost marriage. But there's far more depth than that, with fully realized supporting players, a not-quite-linear narrative line, and a non-preachy examination of moral issues. A beautiful piece of work.

I just finished this book and was surprised when I logged on that so many people really liked this book. There were so many times during reading this book that I just wanted to abandon it, but I am of the philosophy that there is at least some satisfaction from finishing the book and then looking at it as a whole. Upon doing that, I was very disappointed. I felt it left so many issues unresolved- but even worse I didn't really care if they got resolved or not. Yes, there was the attempt to summarize everything in the final chapter- but it still didn't satisfy. This sounded like such a great book to me but I just felt like everything was so rushed and I didn't really care what happened to any of the characters.

Sue Miller has mastered the art of the small moment. In Lost in the Forest, she examines the significance of a conversation or an impulsive act, and then magnifies it into the context of a broader web of relationships. The novel begins with the death of Eva's husband, John, who is struck by a motorist while crossing the street. Eva's ex-husband Mark is thrust into the middle of the tragedy when his older daughter Emily calls him to take care of her, her sister Daisy, and their younger brother Theo (John and Eva's son) to give Eva time to cope with her loss. John's death opens possibilities and destroys others. This theme of opening and closing reverberates throughout the novel as Miller uses these words to describe the facial expressions of her characters as well as intimate acts, opportunities, and doors.

The title derives from a technique John and Eva invented to keep Theo quiet at the dinner table: each family member invents part of a story before passing it on to another, who continues the tale until someone says "and they lived happily ever after." This passing along of the story describes the novel's structure as well. Told from different points-of-view, one character's perspective leads to another's, with private lives revealed in a depth not otherwise accessible. The final section shows the character's lives in the future, the "ever after" of their conflicted pasts.

While Miller is adept at revealing the intricacy of relationships, she is less skilled at believability when it comes to more explosive situations. For example, when Mark discovers a hidden part of Daisy's life, he reacts not at all the way a father would; instead, he comes across as a tool to advance Miller's preconceived ideas of where the plot should head. This flaw and the final section's projection into the future derail some of the momentum Miller builds as she shows how this broken family evolves, but it does not detract from the fine writing and insight.

I recommend this novel for those who enjoy the literary examination of relationships.

I've been a fan of Sue Miller since The Good Mother, and this book left me with some similar feelings. Compelling (I tore through it), disturbing (cringed at times), and true to the aftermath and feelings of divorce and/or death (related to it immediately).

The dramatic death at the opening plunges the family back into fresh grief, and Miller does a masterful job of connecting us to the characters, leading us into their emotional lives as they navigate another upheaval. I thought she did a particularly good job of portraying Daisy. Anyone who has had a child rebel during a family crisis knows their anger and acting out can turn south pretty quickly in any number of damaging ways.

I gave it four stars because I struggled a bit with Mark...hoping the tom-catting ex would straighten out, but not really convinced he could. So I didn't totally buy his changes. And I really found it hard to believe he knew about the plundering of his daughter Daisy and didn't confront Duncan, and even hung out with him in the wrap-up chapter.

That said, the story is still with me, three weeks after finishing the book, and that's the mark of a good novel, IMO.

Finally, I agree with the earlier reviewer who commented on the cover...it's beautiful.