Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Miller (The Good Mother; While I Was Gone; etc.) examines love and betrayal in idyllic wine country in another minutely observed, finely paced exploration of domestic relationships. Idealistic California converts Eva and Mark had a solid marriage until Mark's affair; "bumps in matrimony" is what one of Eva's friends, Gracie, calls such difficulties, and as Miller presents them it's not a question of whether they'll appear but how to deal with them when they do. Some years later, Mark and Eva's two adolescent daughters, Emily and Daisy, are living with Eva and her second husband, John, and their young son, Theo. After John's death in a freak accident, Mark rescues the children from their mother's anguish and, in the process, realizes he is still in love with her. John's death becomes the locus of an elegant and careful investigation of loss—loss of love, loss of innocence—and the conflicts between men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers. As Eva grieves and Mark acknowledges his feelings for her, their quiet younger daughter, 15-year-old Daisy (who "had loved [John] the best!"), enters into an affair with an older man. The backdrop of California vineyards is ideal for the growth and life-cycle themes that Miller so carefully cultivates. As Daisy tries her first glass of wine, has her first taste of sex and experiments with her sense of power and voice, she develops into the heroine of the tale—one of the next generation of women learning to navigate the complex familiar waters of love and domesticity.
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From The Washington Post
It has been said that every good novelist is also a sociologist. Well, if sociologists can be said to shed light on how people must lead their lives at a given time and place in a society, then that statement certainly applies to Sue Miller, who has been providing just that kind of illumination, book to book, since she began her career more than 25 years ago with The Good Mother.This new novel, Lost in the Forest, begins with a cell phone call to a divorced vintner named Mark from his older daughter, Emily, announcing that he is needed immediately, and that it's an emergency. He drives to his ex-wife Eva's house, and picks up Emily, his younger daughter, Daisy, and Theo, Eva's son from her second marriage. It's Emily who tells him that Theo's father, and the girls' stepfather, John, has been killed in an accident:
" 'How did it happen?' he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. 'When?'
"She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, 'This afternoon. A car just . . . hit him.'
"Mark cleared his throat. 'He was driving?'
" 'No.' Her hair swung as she shook her head. 'Walking. With Eva and Theo.'
" 'Jesus. They were with him?' "
The novel turns on this event, while giving forth the past: Mark's infidelity to Eva, their divorce, Eva's marriage to John, the friendship Mark comes to feel for Eva and John, the children's adjustments to changed life -- in other words, the stitching together of this family, with all its fault lines and tremors. When John dies, things shatter again, and the whole process must begin anew. We see into the heart of Eva, worried about the slow recession of her grief, the healing that is taking place within her; we are privy to the longing Mark feels, falling in love with his ex-wife all over again; and we see Daisy, the younger daughter, beginning to realize her power as a woman, experiencing her grief with acts of secret defiance, and finally becoming involved with the husband of her mother's best friend. We follow these strains of narrative back and forth and occasionally even forward, far into the future. For Miller rather daringly jumps forward in time, past the boundaries of the story's time-line.
Here is a passage from a chapter about Daisy and her affair. The man, Duncan, following her on her way home from school, is driving slowly along beside her. "Steering with one hand, his body leaned across the front seat toward her." She sees that it's him and has the thought that she "was sorry she wasn't wearing any lipstick, or a prettier top." The passage continues:
"And with that response came an unconscious dawning of awareness -- awareness of why he was there, and what he was doing, speaking her name, calling her over to him. . . . She understood that he'd come on purpose, that he had thought about her and sought her out.
"Years later when she tried to explain it to Dr. Gerard, she said that it was as though her unconscious mind knew everything that her conscious mind hadn't a clue about yet; and this was the moment when they began to communicate with each other."
This device of leaping years into the future is neither intrusive nor as jarring as it might seem. It is all part of the seamless prose surface Miller has constructed with such artfulness. These passages startle the reader rather wonderfully into a visceral understanding of the essential nature of this fine novel, which is in fact gently comic. For, as we know, comedy in literature stresses the community, and its ongoing life, while tragedy stresses the individual, who is doomed. Lost in the Forest is a comedy in the exact and best literary sense, for it stresses beautifully the continuation of the social unit with which it is concerned. Do I sound like a sociologist? Listen to the novelist, describing her an older Daisy as she rehearses for the part of Miranda in "The Tempest":
"It's the people, she realizes . . . their sheer number and their beauty. The creatures, the mankind: the people! That's where she should put the emphasis, that's what will make it new."
Sue Miller has been making it new now for a long time, and Lost in the Forest is a shining affirmation that her power only continues to grow.
Reviewed by Richard Bausch
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
