The Senator's Wife

I liked the character Delia, she had her strengths as a strong willed women; willing to put up with a cheating husband, but that could also be considered her weakness. This book is well written, even if we may not agree with a woman standing by her man, this really happens in life. Delia showed her strength when she gets an appartment in France and learns French, she escapes for a short time only be to drawn back into her husbands control again. This was a thought provoking book.

Well this is the first book I have read by Sue Miller and I will have to say she is a very good writer however I found all the characters very sad individuals. Though I am sure there are people like that, the book demonstrates a very jaded look at life. I found the ending shocking and I was totally disgusted by the event that ended the relationships. I will not recommend it to any of my friends and I can't understand why it was on the best seller list for so long.

- a total timewaster - uninteresting and unlikeable characters - inexplicable behaviors followed by a totally creepy and unbelievable ending - she must have sold this on her previous output (which, by the way, also seem to involve a lot of unappealing souls) - I hate myself for sticking it out to the dreadful finish ...ugh! (I gave it one star, assuming none was not an option>)

I just finished reading "The Senators Wife", and I'm asking myself why I even bothered. I've been a fan Of Sue Miller's since The Good Mother, which I consider one of my all time favorite books by any author. I normally gravitate towards novels about women and their relationships with each other. As I read this book, I was intrigued by the bonding between the two vastly different women. I felt they were connected by their efforts to sustain their individual marriages, which were at completely different stages, and I also felt a mother daughter bond. between the two. Then, just as I was relating to their willingness to help each other through their struggles in deep and meaningful ways, I'm completely disappointed and a little bit creeped out by the last six chapters. What I was interpreting as a supportive, uplifting pairing of two strong women, suddenly became a shallow, selfish act of betrayal done in, of all things, the name of love. Very strange, very disappointing.

Not Her Best

There is always a seductive aspect to Sue Miller's novels and this one is no different. Intimacies are obsessively detailed until they embed the reader in the complicated emotional lives of her characters. She's a very engaging writer and there are many good moments of emotional tension and sexual jealousy and deception in The Senator's Wife.

But that trait, in so many of Miller's women, which borders on the slatternly looms large in this story; and the questionable moral choices made are less understandable here than in her other work. Some characters' willingness to gratify their own sexual need at the expense of their own and others' emotional bonds are not so much ethically ambiguous as pathological.

The story parallels two couples living as neighbors in a New England town. Meri and Nathan are in their 30s, newlywed. Delia and Tom are in their 70s, he a former well-known U.S. Senator. Set in the early `90s, this story also parallels the Clinton presidency in several ways. Tom--a charismatic, liberal, womanizing politician whose wife never divorced him despite repeated humiliations--suffers a terrible setback in 1994. Delia, the senator's wife, is a strong character in her own right. She has lived separately from Tom for many years and has an independent life, but is still his lover and friend. She chooses to help him after his setback. Meri is the Monica Lewinsky character. In Meri's case, her background is one of poverty and maternal neglect. Thus damaged, she occasionally steals, often lies, and has thoroughly snooped through Delia's private papers. She has few, if any, inner resources and seems only able to define herself through male sexual desire; she only feels whole in the gaze of male attention. She is also portrayed as a bright, educated journalist who is married to Nathan, a more attractive, "patrician" and honest person than she. I found her character implausible, unsympathetic and annoying. Ultimately Meri plays a sexual "game" with Tom as they both indulge a need to feed their desperate egos through sexual dalliance. Meri lies about her role and suffers no consequences to her family although others are hurt.

The problem with all this is that it appears Miller wants us to exonerate Meri and to agree with her delusion that, really, what she did was "out of love". And that Delia, who "prides herself" on being forgiving, is actually an unforgiving person because she only wants to live with Tom if he cannot be his old self--that Delia is emasculating Tom by wanting fidelity in return for her care and commitment. In other words, the story's moral ambiguity slips into negative judgment of the honorable Delia and exoneration of the damaged Meri and reprobate Tom who help each other restore their flagging self-esteem through sexual games. It's as if an alcoholic who had a history of DUIs, and had even maimed a pedestrian or two, was feeling depressed not drinking, so another alcoholic who also needed a lift brought a bottle of scotch to him for the two of them to drink. They felt restored and lively as they drank, though some people got hurt, but opening that bottle of scotch was an act of love, we are expected to believe.

If The Senator's Wife is supposed to be a defense of Monica Lewinsky or Meri, I don't believe it works. In addition, there were some errors and unpolished, mundane prose in this book which would not usually occur in a work by someone of Miller's stature. The text seemed to need another run-through, but perhaps it was rushed to publication in order to coincide with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.