{"id":31,"date":"2010-10-20T12:44:20","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T19:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=31"},"modified":"2010-10-21T05:36:34","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T12:36:34","slug":"private-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=31","title":{"rendered":"Private Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our latest review is by that gentleman and scholar, Robert Moyer of Winston-Salem. Here’s how Bob describes himself (I think it’s mostly true): Bob Moyer is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle. \u00a0His haiku poetry has been published extensively, and may be seen frequently at Haiku News (wayfarergallery.net<\/a>). He is a member of the North Carolina Haiku Society and \u00a0the Piedmont Swing Dance Society, and he is the president of the Carolina Petanque Club.
\n\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

By Robert Moyer<\/p>\n

PRIVATE LIFE. By Jane Smiley. Knopf. 317 pages. $26.95<\/p>\n

A number of writers transport us to another epoch, a generation, covering an expanse of time and place with their particularity of detail.\u00a0 A smaller lot paints an inner landscape\u00a0of their characters, taking us through the internal peaks and valleys, frontiers and redoubts\u00a0they travel throughout their lives.\u00a0 A precious few \u2014 Jane Smiley is one of them \u2014 meld these two skills, sweeping us into other worlds through the eyes of a soul on a sojourn.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In her latest book\u00a0she does just that, giving us\u00a0the life of a country through a life in that country.<\/p>\n

After transferring the Italian setting of the classic Ten Days in the Hills <\/em>so adeptly to the Hollywood Hills\u00a0in her last book, Smiley turns our attention here to the American heartland in 1883, both figuratively and literally.\u00a0 Margaret Mayfield, the daughter seemingly doomed to spinsterhood, stays at home in rural Missouri, the one designated to deliver casseroles across frozen fields,\u00a0help her married sister with laundry, and sit on frigid winter evenings stitching with her mother.<\/p>\n

Smiley\u2019s narrative moves at the speed of life here, as Margaret takes her first wobbling ride on a bicycle, and travels to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.\u00a0 Her life is circumscribed by her quotidian circumstances.<\/p>\n

When Captain Early, a native son of some fame as a scientist, comes courting, he impresses her with a mind that \u201c\u2026worked more quickly and surveyed a broader landscape.\u201d\u00a0 She gets \u201c… the distinct feeling of staring into her future \u2026 the play had begun\u2026. Her own role was to say her\u00a0lines sincerely and with appropriate feeling.\u00a0 At her age, she thought, she should know what those feelings were, but she did not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, she convinces herself that her \u201dnervousness was love, a form of electricity,\u201d which Captain Early knew so much about.<\/p>\n

She travels with the Captain across the country to the naval shipyard at Mare Island, where he commands her life.\u00a0 Her days are a panoply of cooking, typing, cleaning and even driving him about in their sensible Franklin five-passenger.\u00a0 Such well-researched details support the manner in which her life is subsumed by his, as she encounters the San Francisco earthquake, the great Spanish flu epidemic, World War I, and the death of her baby.\u00a0When her friend Dora, a liberated, globetrotting journalist, writes an article about Cairo titled \u201cMy Life Didn\u2019t Prepare Me for This,\u201d Margaret takes it to be about everything in her world.<\/p>\n

Slowly, she awakens to her unchallenged limitations.\u00a0 When a member of her sewing circle chides her for not knowing more about her husband\u2019s business, she starts digging through his papers, daring to inquire, and opening her eyes to her true situation.\u00a0 One day, \u201c\u2026 she saw Andrew as the world saw him \u2026 as if he had turned into a brick and fallen into her lap — he was a fool.\u201d\u00a0 She was taken aback to find her friends considered her a saint, valuing her life \u201c\u2026not for anything she had done, but what she had put up with.\u201d\u00a0 She expands her horizons, traveling on her own into San Francisco, befriending a Japanese couple and their daughter, and even taking a lover.<\/p>\n

As her husband trails off into conspiracy theories that implicate even her, she stews in her escalating disaffection; \u201c\u2026her marriage had become an intolerable torture, \u2026that, from the outside, every marriage looked as bad to her, because she knew every house she passed was a claustrophobic cell where at least one of the partners never learned anything, but did the same things over and over \u2026 and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no way out\u2026 .\u201d<\/p>\n

Smiley bookends her narrative with events of 1942,\u00a0Captain Early off jousting at windmills in Washington and Margaret searching for her Japanese friends sequestered in internment camps.\u00a0 She finds them as well as the memory of the hanging she saw as a child.\u00a0 When she describes the event to her sewing circle, they are amazed she remembers it so well.\u00a0 Oh yes, she replies, \u201cI do remember it now that I\u2019ve dared to think about it.\u00a0There are so many things that I should have dared before this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Margaret\u2019s bitterness stuns the circle \u2014 and the reader.\u00a0 It is an epiphany that she says inspires her to write a book about her Private Life<\/em> \u2014 a book that, most likely, would read like this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our latest review is by that gentleman and scholar, Robert Moyer of Winston-Salem. Here’s how Bob describes himself (I think it’s mostly true): Bob Moyer is a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle. \u00a0His haiku poetry has been published extensively, and may be seen frequently at Haiku News (wayfarergallery.net). He is a member of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","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=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/34"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}