Customer Reviews

While I Was Gone [LARGE PRINT]

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Once again, Sue Miller has written a thoughtful and powerful story, this time about Jo Becker, a woman of quiet integrity and trustworthy love. Her marriage to a kind and gentle minister, their three precocious and talented daughters, and her much loved profession as a veterinarian place her in positions of high regard and respect in her community and great affection and love with her family. But Jo has a past life that she cannot forget, partly because of the role she played at a time when she was searching for her own identity, and largely because of a tragic and horrific event that brought that other life to a screeching halt. When a friend from that past surfaces in her small Massachusetts town, the memories come rushing back with a vividness akin to the actual time, and she relives the tragedy once again. She is drawn to this old housemate in a strange and frightening way, a sexual fantasy that not only attracts but also repels her. This is a story about trust and betrayal . It takes us to the edge of that certainty of how well we can know a person, even if we have lived with them for years. It also reminds us of how we can return from the edge of heartbreak and despair through faith and the abiding affection that sometimes exists between people who truly love each other. Miller's characters are real and if they suffer, the reader suffers with them, hoping for forgiveness and redemption.

I got this book only because Sue Miller is the author. I had absolutely no idea what it was about, didn't even read the book flaps. I just plunged in expecting Miller's talent would shine through. I was NOT disppointed. She has such a way with being able to create an unusual but entirely believable situation and present it entirely from a woman's point of view. And not a sappy woman either. But strong and individualistic. Miller never breaks away to give the husband's or the daughter's viewpoint. It stays focused right on the main character, as painful as that may be. I could SEE this woman, and her home and her life and I could FEEL and identify with her every breath and emotion. An unsettling but fascinating read.

We all have secrets from the past. If you don't believe that, perhaps you shouldn't read this book! But if you do accept that truth, you know that as we reach "a certain age" we have to reconcile our past and our present lives. That is the subject of this book. My life is certainly very different from Jo's, but I can really identify with her. Sue Miller is a talented writer, and While I Was Gone is a gripping novel. I especially enjoyed the interview with the author and the questions for reading groups in the Ballantine Reader's Circle edition.

It took me two evenings to read Miller's novel that offers insights into the lives of middle agers who went through some harrowing experiences in the 1960's. Expieriences that inevitably serve to shape the course of their lives to come. How we live and how we constantly mediate our outer existences with our inner desires is crafted into an interesting read. Sue Miller seems to get better and better at revealing some of lives truths and mysteries, making the reader reflect on, and sometimes cry about the lives the reader is presently inhabiting.

I was SO surprised to read this fantastic book! I savored the descriptions and felt just like I was there. This book made me think about my life and family and appreciate everything so much. It's one of those thought provoking novels that opens your eyes to many things. Forgiveness, love and it's realities, family.... I felt so much while reading this - I'll go read her other books now. I feel SO LUCKY.

Dear Ms. Miller: I guess I'm a sucker for books on the best seller list. As a result I selected While I Was Gone for my April read. The first twenty pages captured feelings, emotions and attitudes of everyones marriage. I thought, "This is great. This is the stuff we all experience but can't remember later".

Your narrative was insightful, crossed all gender lines and made me chuckle and shake my head because it so accurately captured many of the tensions we all feel in long term relationships.

The story on the other hand was somewhat shallow. I had a hard time relating to and feeling empathy for the drugged out heroine as she tripped through the 60's. But fortunately you recovered and later allowed your ability to describe complex personal relationships surface again.

Gee you're a good writer. Your sentences flow toghether nicely, your conversations are so real, and you can describe a walk on a cold night and actually make me shiver.

You certainly did not write a guide on marriage. But you will entertain many readers with a good story. Especially those of us who were in college in the late 60's and early 70's.

Power to the people, peace, and all that Haight stuff.

Sue Miller is a fine writer whose greatest talent lies in her ability to attribute passing insights and feelings to her characters that bring an "Aha!" of identification to the lips of the reader. The perceptions she reveals regarding how things seemed for us forty or fifty-somethings back in the heady counter-cultural days of 1969 youth culture, and how we think back on that time today, make this novel well worth reading. On top of that, there is a reasonably well-drawn "murder mystery" aspect to the book, as well.

On the downside, once the "mystery" is set up fairly early in the book, things drag for quite a while. We read about Jo's daughters, her holiday traditions, her trip to church, sex with her husband. This part of the book seems kind of fragmented, never really seeming to fit into the larger tapestry of the novel as a whole. Her daughter Cass is interestingly "independent" as a rock singer--but so what? That Cass supposedly represents Jo's own "unfulfilled self" is kind of heavy-handed, and not particlarly convincing. Her other daughters are fairly bland--what's the point here?

I also was uncomfortable with the "Eli" angle. This character goes from being a polite, sympathetically lonely representative of "the straight and scientific world" to monster extraordinaire. Are we supposed to infer something from this regarding the alleged value (or lack of same) of science and rational thought? And Jo's own motivation for her self-destructiveness is never made particularly clear, either. Sure, all of us have "secret thoughts" about doing this or that deed that might lead to ruining our lives. But most of us can clearly differentiate between fantasy and reality, and we make the wise choices. What is it about Jo and her background/psyche/mindset that leads her to do the extreme and ultimately foolhardy things she does? Since we never get a satisfactory answer to this, we have to conclude that the purpose of her personality is to be simply a "convenient literary vehicle," and that's not satisfactory to me.

I still think that Sue Miller's best novel is *The Distinguished Guest*. I would recommend that book to anyone.

I've always finished any book I've begun to read. Whether it's because my selections have been so well chosen (ha!) or some other factor I don't know; "While I Was Gone," however, has been the one exception.

I got to the middle and then read a little bit further before I couldn't take it anymore. I was waiting patiently, to no avail, for the story to pick up the pace.

There are two main reasons why I found this novel so boring:

1. The plot---the "twist." Everything that unravels I saw coming. If you read a lot and pay attention to detail, you'll figure the book out pretty quick. This makes for a pretty uninteresting reading experience.

2. The characters. Miller doesn't give me a reason to care about them or what happens to them. She provides emotional moments that do little more than make me think "oh, how sad or oh, how unfortunate." Sort of the same trite response one comes up with when reading through the myriad of unfortunate but mundane tragedies in the newspaper.

Dr. Jo Becker, a vet in a small MA town has a great life...a busy practice, a seemingly happy marriage to minister Daniel, and three grown daughters. Just when she should be enjoying alone time with her husband, why does she feel something is missing? As uncertainty stirs through her, she flashes back to her life just out of college. She had jumped into a hasty marriage to Ted, a young man studying to be a doctor. Those were the days when young, "nice" girls didn't live with a guy, so marriage was the only way she could find what she thought would be her independence. But her marriage was unfulfilling and she ran away to Cambridge where she shared a house with six other young people; two girls and four guys. She felt free and alive for the first time and loved her bohemian life until tragedy struck, which changed her and her housemates forever. Jo was forced to grow up and change her life, so she went back to school to become a vet then married Daniel, and gave birth to and raised three girls.

After nearly three decades, one of the room mates from her past moves to her town with his wife and brings his dog to her office for treatment. Jo is taken back to her youth, and her restlessness with her life intensifies. She fanaticizes an affair with this guy and when they meet at a posh Boston hotel, he blurts out a confession from his past which sends her reeling. She tells Daniel, admitting her attraction to this man, causing a bigger rift between them. Later, when she goes to the authorities with the information, it backfires and she realizes she truly loves Daniel, though fears she has ruined their marriage forever.

This thought provoking book takes the reader to the point of uncertainty of their own past and mistakes they may have made, and gives us insight into what we would do had we been in her shoes. A page turner it incited anger, frustration and angst, but delved deep into the human condition, handling it with aplomb.

This was my first experience reading Sue Miller. I was drawn to the book by the multitude of good reviews from reputable publications, and those reviewers were right about this work. It resonates, it moves, it captures character, memory, emotion, and some of the mystery of human nature. The characters became so life-like for me while I was reading that I found myself thinking about them, psychoanalyzing their motivations, seeing their faces in front of me. I guess the book reached me in particular because I fall into Jo and Daniel's generation. I too experienced life in a group house in the late sixties and early seventies and I easily related to all the yearning and pent up idealism of those times. A word about Sue Miller's penchant for detail: I think what good literature does is sort out the details of living and make a work of art from them. The details draw you in, and finally produce emotional impact that stays with you. So if you have no patience for detail and just want lots of action, a la trash novels, stay away from this one. I for one am happy I discovered Sue Miller. The Good Mother is next.