BOOKS: Miller Time

The arrival of a new novel by Sue Miller is reason enough to raise a glass, but her latest, The Lake Shore Limited, has the additional pleasure of being largely about the theater world (albeit the more subdued, less-noisy Boston one, rather than that of New York).

Here, too, the play is the thing: the title of both the novel and the play-within-the-novel, The Lake Shore Limited, refers to an imagined event—a terrorist attack on a train, referencing and mirroring the real events of 9/11. Like a Rubik’s Cube one keeps turning, this all clicks slowly into place once one discovers that the playwright’s boyfriend was actually on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. Both play and novel explore the playwright’s particular and complicated guilt about having already decided to break up with her boyfriend, Gus, just prior to news of the attack and ultimately his death—a secret shame she’s kept to herself until, somewhat obscurely, working it out now in public through her play.

The novel is, in fact, structured like a Rubik’s Cube—though told in the third person, the story is related through the shifting and overlapping points of view of its four main characters: Leslie, the sister of the now-dead boyfriend; Billy, the playwright (a woman); Rafe, one of the actors starring in the play; and Sam, a friend of Leslie’s, whom Leslie is trying to set up with Billy. The effect is similar to that of a linked set of novellas or long stories, much like Julia Glass’s Three Junes. And as with Three Junes, here again the whole is actually greater than the sum of its parts, each one embellishing and shading and sometimes changing what we know so far—although perhaps not as much as one would hope.

Leslie, a middle-aged married woman in her mid-fifties, wakes up at a hotel in Boston from a nap on the day she is to see Billy’s play. While she seems happily if a bit sleepily married, we soon learn that Leslie has had to weather her own share of sadness and disappointments, namely the inability to have children of her own and her ongoing though dimming grief surrounding her younger brother’s death. In this first section, we also get to see the play through the eyes of Leslie, getting a fairly detailed though somewhat clumsy synopsis of it, with long swatches of dialogue and stage direction included; the fifty-page section ends with Leslie; her husband, Pierce; and Sam at a restaurant awaiting the arrival of the playwright Billy following the performance.

The plot thickens only marginally once the narration switches to Rafe’s point of view. He and Billy have a one-night stand, a somewhat perfunctory and incompletely explained act—though Rafe’s marriage is now sexless due to his wife suffering from ALS.

Though Billy is arguably the most crucial character in the novel, in many ways she is the most confounding. Even when Miller continues the story through Billy’s point of view, she is not portrayed as entirely sympathetic. We learn about her strained relationship with Gus, the events leading up to his death, and the awkward and still ongoing aftermath of her guilt, particularly as it relates to Leslie: Billy’s numb response to Gus’s death has always been misinterpreted by Leslie as Billy feeling overwhelmed with grief, when, in fact, she is simply guilty and confused by its inexplicable resolution. After much back story, Billy’s section catches up to where the reader was left long ago, with Pierce and Leslie leaving the restaurant abruptly so as to allow Billy and Sam to get to know each other better.

But despite the two seemingly connecting, Billy remains resistant to Sam’s overtures. And it’s Billy’s somewhat confusing response to Sam that is the most aggravating part of the novel. While partially explained—Billy doesn’t want Sam (and therefore possibly Leslie) to know what her real feelings were for Gus—the reader still can’t help feeling impatient with Billy’s selfishness. “She didn’t want to be in Sam’s life. How could she be? She didn’t want to be in anyone’s life but her own.”  It’s a credit to Miller, however, that one can get so worked up about a fictional character as to have such strong feelings about them even when not reading the book.

No, it’s not character development where Miller falls short; it’s story, or rather, the lack of one this time around. While Miller’s ten previous novels have almost always been built around a solid-enough plot, often times around a big, controversial event (starting with her rather notorious debut, The Good Mother, in which a couple has sex while a child, maybe sleeping, maybe not, is in the same bed, and a boyfriend is accused of molestation; and continuing right up to her most recent work, The Senator’s Wife), this time Miller seems to try to do more with less, and the strain shows in some of her less crucial digressions. While this may seem like a big quarrel, it actually isn’t: even with less narrative fuel, Miller succeeds more than most do with strong narrative firepower by offering us a revelation or two worthy of a Henry James novel. Wholly out of the blue, a seemingly successful middle-age architect is abruptly blindsided by an existential ton of bricks shortly after dropping his son off at a train station.

Sam had a sense of being suspended. Even the weather seemed vague and indeterminate. It was gray and misty, about to rain, but much warmer than it had been. People walked past in no rush. It seemed to Sam that he’d failed at everything he’d turned his hand to—his children, his marriage. It seemed that nothing had happened to him, nothing had happened in his life, for years. His sons, his ex-wife, they’d moved on; they were making choices and changing things for themselves, while he’d done nothing.

Or later, when a middle-aged wife tries to come to terms with the modest expectations of her own, somewhat receding life.

All her life, she had tried not to want. To be content. To be at peace. Safety lay that way, she had thought. You couldn’t be hurt.… She didn’t know anymore whether she was content. Whether she was at peace.

But all she wanted was right here. Here was where she felt safe. Next to Pierce. In their bed. Here, where she lived—safe and quiet and dark.

Dark like a coffin, some might conclude.

But good, bad, or even uneventful, Miller remains one of the most fearless and unflinching writers of our time, compelled to explore the deepest and most hidden parts of her characters’ lives, warts and all. This alone, her ability to strip down her characters to their most naked selves, both literally and metaphorically, makes any journey with her at the helm more than worth our while, and makes it nearly impossible, in fact, to look away, regardless of how unsettling the view. [JUNE 2010]

Managing editor Chris Newbound is also a part-time playwright, with recent staged readings at the Berkshire Playwrights Lab and the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

THE GOODS

The Lake Shore Limited
By Sue Miller
Alfred A. Knopf