Cover of Private Life by Jane Smiley. Photo / Supplied
Private Life by Jane Smiley
Faber & Faber, $38.99
Smiley on marriage? (A marriage, anyway.) It promises discoveries, dramas, dissections. It doesn't disappoint. Unremarkable Missouri spinster Margaret, her personal life marked and marred by suicide, public execution (sic) and repression, makes an astonishing marriage - to glamorous, brilliant Capt. Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, a name that I really have
to reproduce in full.
Alas, it's not long before Margaret realises that the glamorous etc, Andrew etc is a man of obsessions and delusions. He woos her with talk of the universe's vast wonders, but as his own wonders fade, he dwindles into someone to be protected and placated. She can leave, or she can endure. She endures - for decades.
It's typical Smiley: the big sweeps of time combined with the close anatomising of tiny, telling details.
The lives of stoic, modest Margaret, and her sister-in-law Dora, career-focused new woman and confidante of Henri Bergson, are also a consideration of marriage as the early 20th century sees it - solid and stolid, satisfying or stifling.
Personal stories stand beside global events. There's Bolshevism, women's suffrage, Einstein and the cosmological revolution, paranoia as World War II approaches and Japanese Americans are interned in horse stalls.
At first, Margaret is compliant and unassuming. She aims to look "neat ... no better than that". She accepts that "a wife could know her husband was thoroughly wrong, but the last thing on earth she could do was say so".
But Andrew's pursuit of astronomy begins to distance him from the world personally as well as professionally. His New Theory of the Aether is met with apathy, contempt, and accusations of plagiarism. Margaret's perception and defiance grow.
It's not a merry book. There are a few wry smiles, especially in the knitting and sewing groups whose real purpose is to commiserate about marriage.
There are a very few diverting scenes: Margaret learning to drive and finding that "her left foot was rather stupid". But mostly, life is something to suffer rather than celebrate.
A novel of close, relentless, sometimes monotone writing. Loneliness, melancholy and regret fleck almost every life. "There are so many things that I should have dared." Bleak, masterly, hard to forget.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
