Private Life, by Jane Smiley

In Private Life, Jane Smiley explores the interior world of Margaret Mayfield Early. Margaret is a Missouri girl in the late 19th century, the Mayfield family's third child and oldest girl. When her mother is giving birth to one of her younger sisters, her brother takes her to witness a hanging. For years, Margaret claims she cannot remember this experience. Her failure to remember it becomes something for which she is known--and a window into how fully she can suppress her feelings.

Her older brothers and her father die tragically, and the all-female survivors head to the family farm to live with their grandfather, about whom Margaret says, "The world had swirled around him, but he had done as he pleased and remained as evidently himself as a tree might, or a stone might." Great energy goes into finding husbands for the young women, but Margaret somehow reaches the age of 27 without marrying. Then, Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early--a man with a reputation for being both brilliant and difficult--asks for her hand. She accepts his offer, and the couple (marriage still unconsummated) head to California, where Andrew has gotten a low-prestige job at a small naval observatory.

With few expectations for happiness in marriage, Margaret finds little joy with her husband but manages to entertain herself in other ways--an ongoing friendship with Dora (her sister's sister-in-law), who becomes a globetrotting reporter, charity work, and an array of relationships with people ranging from a handsome ex-pat Ukrainian and a Japanese-American family. Her two pregnancies end in grief--one a miscarriage, the other producing a very ill baby who will live only a few weeks.

Meanwhile, Andrew is busy developing a theory that explains the universe much more satisfactorily than Einstein has done. When his book is not well-received (Margaret, who types his work, has herself concluded that her husband is something of a crackpot), Andrew becomes even stranger, creating increasing stress in the marriage. By the time World War II arrives, Andrew's eccentricities drive Margaret to the brink. Does she fall over the precipice or take action to save herself? No spoiler here, but the ending is rewarding.

I have not been a big Jane Smiley fan, but I really enjoyed this book. The characters are particularly well-drawn; while Andrew is hardly sympathetic, the depiction of a failed scientist who does not realize how far off his theories are is fascinating. While some reviewers have found Margaret to be unsympathetic, I found her endearing and strong, if not courageous. Smiley beautifully limns the dynamics in what might be called a marriage of convenience--a type of union that must have been common in an era when women had few options for living outside marriage. I highly recommend Private Life.

Favorite passages:

Pedaling straight forward was a new experience for her . . . Covering distance in this solitary manner was marvelously intoxicating. The brown fields and the blue sky were all around; they seemed to dissipate crisply and evenly into all the distances--forward, backward, upward. The fields were darkly defined by the denuded brown trunks of hickories, black walnuts, and oaks. In Mr. Jones's pasture, across the fence from John Gentry's hay field, five or six white hogs were grunting and rooting for acorns; the noises they made had the clarity of gongs ringing in the air.

She looked at his face. She saw that he had but one thing left, which was that he could look back at her. She stroked the top of his head, moving the thin hairs this way and that, feeling the smoothness of his golden skin. She held him closer, as gently as she could. And then, in the way that you can feel with your baby but not see or sense with anyone else larger or more distantly related, she felt the life force go out of him entirely.

She could describe this feeling she had, that her marriage had become an intolerable torture, that the sight of his head ducking slightly as he went through doorways of the new house was repellent to her, that she felt warm, humid air press against her when he entered the room, that his voice made her want to scream, that she thought he was a fool and even a madman, and that she was going mad herself, that, 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, bud did the same things over and over, like an infernal machine, and the other partner had no recourse of any kind, no way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave relief. The doorways of the new house were very high. It was mere habit to duck his head for them.