The Senator's Wife (Vintage Contemporaries) [Paperback]

Sue Miller (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage Contemporaries | Publication Date: January 6, 2009

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Tom's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. Soon Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, as they both reckon with the contours and mysteries of marriage: one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun. With precision and a rich vitality, Sue Miller—beloved and bestselling author of While I Was Gone—brings us a highly charged, superlative novel about marriage and forgiveness.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

In her latest novel, Sue Miller contemplates wifehood from the perspective of two women—one at the start of her marriage, the other reconciled to the direction her relationship has taken over the decades yet nonetheless hopeful for change. In capturing their dreams, fears, and disappointments, Miler paints a devastating, realistic, and unsentimental portrait of both Meri and Delia. What to make of the two negative reviews? They seemed complete opposites: the Los Angeles Times enjoyed the book until the twist at the end, whereas the New York Times Book Review admired only the climax. Yes, the novel is a domestic drama, with its compare-and-contrast marriage storylines, a tone that can be overly earnest, and protagonists that sometimes lack self-awareness. But there is good insight into character here, and the story’s masterful plot twist—a final betrayal—reveals Miller’s ample talents as a storyteller.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307276694
• ISBN-13: 978-0307276698
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #547,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 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

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This review is from: The Senator's Wife (Hardcover)

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.

86 of 98 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
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This review is from: The Senator's Wife (Hardcover)

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

18 of 20 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
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This review is from: The Senator's Wife (Hardcover)

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.