The Senator's Wife (Hardcover)

by Sue Miller (Author)
Key Phrases: New York, New England, Tom Naughton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Connie Schultz

It was probably inevitable that Sue Miller, a gifted storyteller, would eventually unleash her talents on the topic of political marriage. As Miller explained recently in an interview with NPR's Linda Wertheimer, she has long been intrigued by the dynamics of such marriages, particularly those in which a wife's loyalty seems to outlast her husband's worthiness. Politics breeds the sacrificial wife who abandons her dreams for those of her husband but then suffers public humiliation when the honorable member fails to keep his in his pants.

What, Miller wonders, makes these wives stay put in marriages that diminish them?

It's a good question, but it remains unanswered in an otherwise compelling tale of the marital complexities and disappointments in Miller's latest novel, The Senator's Wife.

First, a disclosure: I am a U.S. senator's wife. I am fairly new to the role, and it is neither my vocation nor occupation, but it bears mentioning. It also explains why I could not pass up the chance to read this book. There are so many assumptions about marriages like mine. What might Miller's be?

This is the tale of two marriages and how they intersect and, eventually, collide. Meri and Nathan are young and still negotiating the terrain of matrimony when they move next door to Delia Naughton. Delia is married to former U.S. senator Tom Naughton, a man who cheats on his wife so often one half-expects this tale to turn into a murder mystery.

Despite his infidelities, Delia is unwilling to sever all ties with him. They no longer live together, but she won't divorce Tom and occasionally still sleeps with him. Miller depicts their dalliances with her usual sizzle and pop, and many readers will celebrate Delia's 70-something vivacity. Still, the question hovers: Why waste her energy on him?

We are told countless times that Tom is charismatic, but Miller gives little proof of his charms. Instead, Delia just seems a fool. "She knew Tom had other women, and she told herself that every time she was thinking of him, he was thinking of someone else. Every time she wanted him, he was making love with someone else. But when she was swept with jealous longing for him, none of that mattered. She couldn't help herself. She called him."

We are given no mitigating circumstances for her continued devotion. Husband and wife do not share a commitment to any causes, nor does Delia enjoy the spotlight. We learn early that she prefers to live in small-town New England, far away from Washington.

"She supposed most of it was just getting away with Tom from the sexually charged atmosphere of Washington, where a handsome man with power, a man who talked easily, a man who was charming and chivalric around women, could always find companionship. Or, more accurately, had to actively choose not to have companionship, if that's what he wanted."

Meanwhile, Meri is struggling next door with what it means to be a grown-up. She resents the changes her husband's academic career have brought to her life, and when she accidentally becomes pregnant, she resents that, too. What, she wonders, is to become of her?

"She suspects there's trouble coming. But she feels if they can just hold on to the easy camaraderie and sexual heat of their early days, then they can find a way to keep talking about all this, a way of shaping their marriage to suit them both."

Meri is intrigued with Delia, whom she sees as "private" and "unknowable." Inexplicably, this same emotionally aloof woman hands Meri, still a virtual stranger, her house key and asks her to collect the mail and water her plants while she spends the winter in Paris. Almost immediately upon Delia's departure, Meri explores her drawers and cupboards and reads dozens of old letters that chronicle a challenging, often heartbreaking marriage.

While Delia's immediate, and misplaced, trust in Meri rings false, Miller conveys just how it is to be married to a politician who insists on holding center stage. The senator bows his head in church, wondering how many are watching. He insists on taking a cab home, rather than allowing a family member to pick him up at the airport. "He likes that solo, dramatic entrance," his son says.

"Plus, of course, there's the cabdriver," Delia answers. "One more vote to be gathered in."

Miller gets other details right, too. During campaigns, a staff member hands Delia her speech and orders her not to change a word. Every year, the annoying Christmas cards arrive, "only a few of them from what Delia thought of as real people -- the rest just politics."

One of the most devastating scenes in the book comes when Delia realizes what her husband's infidelities have cost her. She is alone in a Paris museum when she spots an erotic drawing of a nude woman splayed across a bed. In a breathtaking moment of clarity and heartbreak, she sees what her husband sees with every mistress, every affair: "The flesh, the youth, the beauty, the sex, of another woman as Tom would see her, as Tom would respond to her. The inevitability of his desire for someone else made visible." She stares at the sketch and sobs.

A final betrayal involves Meri and Tom in an implausible set of circumstances that leaves the reader disgusted with all four characters.

At story's end, one can imagine most wives shaking their heads and mumbling, "At least my marriage isn't that bad." Most real-life senators' wives would likely agree.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 8th edition (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307264203
• ISBN-13: 978-0307264206
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (109 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #185,153 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "You can get used to anything. It's one of the most necessary things life teaches us.", January 7, 2008

By	Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The newly-married woman. The senator's wife. A generation of differences. In 1993, when Meri Fowler and her husband, Nathan, move into the other half of a stately home owned by Delia Naughton, wife of former senator Tom Naughton, a Washington mover and shaker and beltway roué who now visits his wife only sporadically, Meri is fascinated by the older Delia. Without examining her reasons, Meri hopes for an intimacy that seems always out of reach, especially as Delia travels frequently to visit her grown children and to a secluded Paris apartment. It is Nathan who is curious about the senator, hoping in vain for a meeting, which fails to occur but for a brief time one holiday. Life settles into routine until Meri learns she is pregnant, her world suddenly shifting from an engaging job at a local radio station to the tunnel-vision of new motherhood, all-consuming days of feeding, changing, feeding, sleeplessness a further strain on a once carefree marriage.

But Delia is the centerpiece of Miller's engaging novel, a self-contained woman who has learned at last to make peace with an untrustworthy husband and the shattering of a dream, his peccadilloes finally driving a wedge into their marriage. Delia survives, healing with time and circumstance, the façade of gentility intact. And Delia's natural generosity toward Meri is not significant, at least to the senator's wife, caught up in her own emotions as the ground shifts once more in her relationship with Tom, a long-hoped for contretemps shimmering on the horizon. It is Miller's juxtaposition of the lives of these two women that drives the story, Delia's long journey through a marriage that has challenged her on every level, Meri the unwitting, if randomly destructive catalyst: "It was as if she dropped out of time, out of its press and obligation, out of its failings. Her failings."

The nature of marriage and motherhood, the needs of women at various stages of their lives, the roles of spouses and abrupt, devastating betrayals are themes Miller knows well, describes persuasively. The Naughton's painful marriage is a revelation, an explanation of the generational drift in then and now, women who committed themselves to marriage and children, their husband's careers dominating their lives. In the self-absorbed world of her youth and new motherhood, Meri is shockingly unaware of the consequences of her actions; but even youth is a chimera- Meri is thirty-six, not some naïve young married with a new baby. Meri hasn't earned her curiosity, her intrusiveness and Delia has spent a lifetime protecting her privacy. How can Meri begin to comprehend the dignity of such as Delia, the hard-won rewards of devotion? Marriages are impossible to predict, let alone happy endings. Miller's precise manipulation of human frailty, the small, important counterpoints and misunderstandings that beleaguer her characters are compelling. Luan Gaines/ 2008

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Idea, Bad Ending, February 23, 2008

By	MJS "Constant Reader" (New York, United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. I like Sue Miller's writing and the topic (why does a political wife stay with a philandering husband?) is interesting. The title character, Delia Naughton, is interesting if opaque. So what's the problem?

It's the other heroine of the book, Meri. She starts off seeming ungrounded and unanchored. Midway through the book she turns creepy. By the end of the book she's so self-absorbed she takes part in one of the biggest trainwreck moments I've read in a long, long time. Yet in the epilogue she's happy as a clam, justifying her actions as "an act of love."

I kept hoping that Meri's husband would start cheating on her and we'd have Delia and Meri providing a generational mirror of how women react to infidelity. That would have been a cliche but Miller might have made it interesting. It also would have forced Meri to deal with her marriage in terms of something other than sex and passive-agressive withdrawal.

Weirdly, the most self-aware person in the book seems to be the Senator himself. He admits that he's not capable of staying faithful to his wife even when he wants to be. Delia convinces herself she's faced this about her husband but, tragically, she has not.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Life Doesn't Change in its Fundamentals", February 3, 2008

By	Michele Cozzens "www.michelecozzens.com" (Cloud 8) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I've read enough work by Sue Miller to say with complete confidence that she's a brilliant writer, and a master at character development. The Senator's Wife is a gray tale of two couples, neighbors sharing an east coast duplex in an upscale neighborhood. In the story, Miller brings in the focus so tightly, that it feels a little voyeuristic prying into the everyday thoughts, feelings and actions of these characters. Said characters are ordinary, but at the same time fascinating because of their mundane circumstances. Given this, one may wonder how the author manages to keep the reader interested for 306 pages. Again, I attribute it to the brilliant writing.

Alternating chapters from the perspectives of Delia, a grandmother who is the "Senator's Wife," and Meri, a woman in her mid-30s who is fascinated by the quiet glamour of Delia, move the story from 1993 to present day. Meri and her husband Nathan, a college professor, move to the split house. The decision to purchase their portion of the dwelling is based on his fascination with Delia's husband, a notorious senator, now retired. The senator is mysterious and although he is rarely seen, he is very much a part of the story. Delia's excerpts explain their complicated relationship in detail. But the thrust of the story centers on Meri's fascination with Delia, hence the title, and how the relationship between the women leads to the climax.

The Senator's Wife is a fundamental look at life. It's a look at young marriage and an aged marriage lived side-by-side. It's a look at long process of raising children from birth to middle age, and at finding one's place as a caregiver. It's not action-packed or even very exciting, but for fans of Sue Miller and for those readers who appreciate strong character development, I do recommend reading this novel.

Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club.