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In this fine novel, filled with authentic detail of time, place and demographics, the main characters are or have been married \u2014 the larger-than-life bookstore owner Graham, his second wife Annie, his first wife Frieda, and their son Lucas. Only Sarah, the daughter of the second marriage, is not married. Late in the book, she muses about what she wants:<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Not marriage \u2014 not all the other promises to be made, and then broken. Not the \u00a0 children, the difficult growing up. The wounds inflicted, back and forth, the inevitable disappointments, the unbridgeable distances.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Not that.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>Not monogamy.<\/em><\/p>\n By this time in the book, author Sue Miller has manifested in excruciatingly fine detail a litany of the pitfalls (many) and pleasures (few) of Monogamy<\/em>. It all\u00a0 begins when Graham unexpectedly dies in his sleep. He leaves Annie with grief, his son with a sense of distance, his ex-wife with resentment and his daughter with her insecurity. He also leaves behind an act of adultery.<\/p>\n Miller takes a page from Anton Chekov\u2019s playbook here. Chekov said that if you hang a gun on the wall in the first act of a play, you have to use it in the second part. Miller loads Graham\u2019s infidelity up in the first few pages and then fires it off in the second part. With finesse that would make Chekov nod in appreciation, she stages a scene in which Annie comes across the mistress weeping at Graham\u2019s desk, and immediately shifts from grief to anger. Miller takes the rest of the book, up to the very last sentence, to resolve that anger.<\/p>\n With an astute eye for detail, she shows how a disturbance like Graham\u2019s resonates through the lives of the other characters. The reader experiences Annie\u2019s anger while she\u2019s in the dentist\u2019s chair, Lucas\u2019 distance from his mother at the dining room table, Sarah\u2019s consternation when she finds a book defaced by her mother. It\u2019s not often that a book about\u00a0domesticity could be called a page-turner, but Monogamy <\/em>comes close. There is no mystery here, but there is more drama than one would expect, thanks to Miller\u2019s skill. And many a reader will recognize many of the pitfalls of Monogamy.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bob Moyer takes on a different kind of mystery – not a whodunit, but a look at the strange realm of human love and relationships. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer MONOGAMY. By Sue Miller. Harper. 338 pages. $28.99 In this fine novel, filled with authentic detail of time, place and demographics, the main […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,426],"tags":[136,1198,1197],"class_list":["post-2767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-popular-fiction","tag-contemporary-fiction","tag-monogamy","tag-sue-miller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2769,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767\/revisions\/2769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}