Customer Reviews

While I Was Gone

5 star:		(76)
4 star:		(103)
3 star:		(73)
2 star:		(31)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

This was my first experience reading Sue Miller. I was drawn tothe 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.

When Oprah announced this as her latest pick, I was happy because this book has been sitting in my bookcase for over a year waiting for me to read it. I finished it in two days and was happy I finally had the impetus to read a Sue Miller offering. She is a gifted and talented writer but in this book she gives you a main character, Jo Becker, who you love at times and want to strangle at others. It's terrible to say but during the book I kept saying to myself, "what a jerk she is." I know that's not a great descriptive word but it fits. This is a character who always thinks there is something better around the corner and although she's been married for 25 years, wanderlust is lurking around every corner. While devoted at times (to animals), I found her shallow both in the way she treated her husband's profession as well as her daughters. Over the years, Jo had lived a kind of quirky lifestyle and 25 years later, an old friend comes back into her life and wreaks havoc. The unfortunate thing is that it didn't have to be this way but wonderful Jo allowed it to be. For anyone who has lived through the 60's or even thought about free, communal living and is now living in just the opposite lifestyle, you will probably find this book as page-turning as I did. I felt that I was rushing the book because I wanted to see how it would end. This is not your typical Oprah dysfunctional family book set in the South -- rather it is set in the North but a bit dysfunctional all the same. Definitely worth the read.

While I Was Gone is the story of a fifty-something professional woman(she's a veterinarian), with a great husband, terrific daughters and a distant past that comes back to haunt her. During the 60's, the main character, Jo, lived in a group house where one of her roommates was brutally murdered. Now, many years later, another housemate, Eli Mayhew, moves to her small New England town and Jo gets caught up in her past and with this man. This story reads like a soap opera or movie of the week. Jo continually makes bad decisions that almost ruin her marriage and the relationship she has with her daughters. I found the story line very frustrating and at times unbelievable. The characters were not as well drawn and developed as they should have been and their thoughts and actions never made sense to me. Ms Miller is a good writer, with a wonderful ear for dialogue. But, this novel got bogged down in detail and came to a very unsatisfying ending. Readers of Sue Miller will probably like this book, but it left me flat.

Sue Miller is among my favorite authors and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Her incredible storytelling and attention to detail made me feel a part of Jo & Daniel's family. I identified with many of Jo's emotions about marriage, middle-age, and family bonds, yet the amazing thing is, I'm single, 34-years-old, and don't have, nor desire to have, any children. The one thing Jo and I did have in common was animals -- I work at an animal shelter and loved the fact her character was a vet.

I did have some problems with the book, though. I liked the pacing in the beginning when Miller went back to Jo's days in the Cambridge house. Her description of the closeness amongst the house members was similar to my Boston college experience. I spent my sophmore year living that lifestyle of casual sex, drugs and late-night "house talks." But after Dana's murder the book dragged on a bit. While I was interested in Jo's family life with Daniel and the girls, I felt that the middle of the book broke the momentum that Miller had going in the beginning. This was frustrating and while I understand her reasons for slowing down I couldn't wait for the chapters where Jo & Eli would come together. Daniel's response to Jo's revelation about her meeting with Eli was frustrating too because I felt that his character would have made the effort to sort through things much more quickly. Their long-term distance from one another almost seemed out of character on both of their parts.

I will definitely continue to read Sue Miller's books. She is a truly gifted writer that captures whatever moment she is attempting to portray. Great book!

This was my first Sue Miller book, but it will not be my last!I read "While I Was Gone" in a few days...Sue Miller has a gift as a writer to bring the reader inside the pages,the world, and situations she is writing about. I liked the main charactor, Jo....her honesty towards her husband, and I found out things about myself that I hadn't reflected on before. Ofcourse, Jo's husband was too good to be true, an angel really, to put up with her infacuations. One of my favorite parts is when Jo tells her husband about her "so called almost affair" and she knows he sees her walking out to her car, but he stands hidden in the garage. I think everyone should read this book, dive into the pages and swim directly into the lives of these characters ......You may just find something out about yourselves!

Sue Miller is a fine writer whose greatest talent lies in herability 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.

When I first sat down to read this book, I had no idea what I was getting into. It started out with a description of what I would describe a typical family--a husband, wife and children. The children have all 'flown the coop', leaving Jo and Daniel alone in the house with the dogs. Jo is a veterinarian who treats a dog belonging to someone from another lifetime, when she was in her 20s. When Eli comes back into her life courtesy of his dog, Jo starts remembering when she was in her 20s. She ran away from her home and started another life because she was restless and needed a change. She met a group of people and moved in with them in Cambridge, in the 60s. From there, the story goes back and forth, from present day back to the 60s. You get the perspective of her back then and now. The book is remarkably well written. Sue Miller does not miss a beat when she describes the interactions between Jo and Daniel and Jo and her 'other' family in Cambridge. The book is incredible in the description and portrayals of every character.

While I Was Away addresses the restlessness that probably most people feel but may never act upon. It describes one woman's journey to 'find herself' in the 60s. It takes a tragedy to bring her together with the man she will eventually marry and have a family with. It also addresses Jo's need to put closure to the tragedy in the 60s.

I recommend this book highly.

Anyone who has ever taken a cold hard look at their life and wondered how they ended up where they did, will love this book. It was gripping at times and the title really hit home for me.

"While I Was Gone" tells what happens when you aren't content, when you keep looking for more or different, never satisfied with what is. Being physically present in a relationship doesn't mean a thing if you're really "gone."

I absolutely loved this novel. The fact that Jo was such astrong woman, who had accomplished so much, was key. But the best part for me was some of Sue's writing, in which she/Jo expressed feelings I've had but have not been able to put into words. They were REAL feelings/fears/revelations, even in the context of this fictional work. It really blew me away. I've tried other Sue Miller books and not been as connected; this one really hit home for me.

"While I Was Gone" is told by a middle-aged woman named Jo Becker, a veterinarian, happily married wife, and mother of three daughters who lives outside of Boston. The wife of an old housemate (Eli) brings their dog to her office, and this triggers Jo's memories of her time after college when she was running from her first marriage. She had assumed a new identity and lived in a group house in Boston, where she became close with her housemates, one of whom she finds murdered in their living room when she gets home from cocktail waitressing one day. The book flashes back to tell the story of her time in the group house and then returns to her married life, where she meets Eli again and find herself attracted to him. In all the lives Jo has lived (first marriage, recovering in the group home, second marriage, and even childhood), she keeps secrets from those she loves, sometimes without realizing it. The book is essentially about how those secrets affect her and her life.

Within the first ten pages of this book, I thought "Oo, I'm going to enjoy this book," and oh how I did. Miller writes of the emotional and psychological lives of her characters more realistically than any author I know. I savored the many details that conveyed who Jo was, how she reacted to others, and why she behaved as she did. Despite getting to know Jo as a stable, mature woman, I completely understood her earlier experience of wanting to take big risks and reinvent herself when she realizes she has been making choices to please others, at the cost of not knowing herself. We learn about Jo's relationship with her children, now young adults, and she captures the tension Jo feels in trying to be a loving mother while also conveying her respect for their independence. When Jo and her husband Daniel have a falling out, I fully understood her portrayal of the emotional experience of being polite with one another but looking for tiny clues about how he is feeling, what he is expecting. At the end, there is a scene with her elderly mother that brings together the theme of keeping secrets and it completed my understanding of Jo. It was a very satisfying experience.

In some ways, this is a narrow book in that it delves into the small life of one woman; those who like stories with a lot of action and many interesting characters might not like this book. The strength of this book is the depth with which it explores and explains the emotional life of that woman. If you like detailed, psychologically real stories, you will like this book. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.