Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller (2010)Sue Miller's sweetly melancholy, beautifully patterned new novel fills the description of literary fiction as a story where nothing happens: nothing, that is, but the quiet, important tumults in people's hearts. Leslie, 59, wavers between contentment with her marriage and a craving for something more, embodied mainly in an almost-lover from her past, Sam, but also in Gus, the adored younger brother she lost to 9/11. Gus's lover, Billie, a female playwright, had just decided to break up with him when he died. Ambivalent about his death, she clings all the more fiercely to his memory, finding it hard to embrace someone new. Her paralysis confuses Sam, who sees his own attraction to her as a happy accident, unlike poor romantic choices he made in earlier years. Meanwhile, Rafe, 45, uses his lead role in Billie's new play to express his changing feelings towards his wife, stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease. Exploring a man's conflicted response to the news that his wife may have died in a terrorist attack, Billie's play reflects the inner dilemmas of all four protagonists.
Luminous detail, transparent prose, and psychological depth give Miller's world an absorbing realism, though few real people achieve the serene wisdom granted to Leslie, Billie, Sam, and Rafe in the end. Edith Wharton, another moralizing chronicler of New England, would have appreciated Miller's emphasis on wisdom's price, the renunciation of certain dreams and pleasures. But her faith that domestic happiness is possible at all makes her more akin to contemporaries Anna Quindlen and Anne Tyler. Like Billie, who rejects one play ending as "too Ethan Frome-ish," Miller tips her story's difficult emotional balance towards joy.
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