Turkey Tracks: January 9, 2011
Jane Smiley’s PRIVATE LIFE
I finished reading Jane Smiley’s new novel PRIVATE LIFE (May 2010) last night.
I highly recommend it.
It’s the work of a mature author writing at the top of her form. It’s engaging at all levels: character development, plot, mystery, profound engagement with issues and ideas.
It’s a bit of an epic, since it chronicles the main character’s life from teenage years to mid-sixties–beginning in the late 1880. Margaret is well on the road to spinsterhood in a small Missouri town 300 miles from St Louis, when a marriage is arranged with a locally famous, seemingly brilliant but socially awkward man from a prominent family who might become a nationally famous scientist. They move to coastal California near San Francisco and live on an island with a naval base, and her decades-long discovery of who her husband is–and who she is–actually begins. (No, he is not a serial killer–this is a serious study of character and the changing conditions for women and the culture in general through this period.) The Japanese have a settlement just inland from the island, and the Margaret brushes up against a particular Japanese family for many years. She is devastated when they are swept up and put into internment camps when WWII breaks out–an occurrence that brackets the novel’s opening and closing pages.
I wish I could go back and read it new once again.
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