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Description
As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed.
Media reviews
While not all marriages are as suffocating as Margaret Early’s, the novel reminds us that, for many, that holy sacrament was, and continues to be, a matter of solemn duty and agonising boredom'. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
In these too public times, the notion of a private life
In these too public times, the notion of a private life
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seems both desirable and strangely exotic, but for the unhappy wife in Jane Smiley's brilliant new book, it is something altogether different. Thinking – but, characteristically, not talking, even to her dearest friend – about her relationship with her husband, Margaret Early comes to the conclusion that "their lives were mostly private now, lived side by side as necessary, but whatever there had been for them both . . . had dissipated the way certain qualities of light did." Show Less
Smiley plays these scenes out gradually, finessing the increments that build domestic anxiety to extend and enrich her central concern: a fully fleshed portrait of the conflicted loyalties of a woman raised to be a submissive wife, a constant support to her husband.
Ms. Smiley traces this change with such skill that reading about it becomes ever more gripping as her novel takes readers closer to that day at the racecourse. The author also follows "Middlemarch" in evoking a particular place at a particular time. She describes America as it pulled out of the
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Civil War into the Gilded Age, and then slid through blinding overconfidence into recession and a second all-consuming war. Show Less
Language
Original publication date
2010-05-04