Private Life

by Jane Smiley

I have been a huge fan of Jane Smiley since "A Thousand Acres," her novel based on King Lear published in 1991. That novel stayed in my mind as one of my favourites for a long time, although I didn't read much of her other work, until I stumbled upon "Moo", in the late 90's. Then I lost track of her until she came out with the marvelously useful, honest, funny and erudite "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel", which grew out of her sudden inability to write novels after years and years of work. In that book she uses her block to read 100 of the best novels ever written, review them and try to discover why, for her, some of them work and some don't. Jane Smiley is a stubborn and creative problem-solver after my own heart, so when I read that she had published a new novel, I bought it and placed it on the very top of my tbr pile.

"Private Life" is wonderful. As a story, it is quiet, truthful, straight-forward, moving. As a piece of fiction, it is inspirational. A small, ordinary life is set against the epic sweeps of early 20th Century history. But in Smiley's hands, the small becomes crucial and the epic secondary. On the cover, under the title, the publishers (I assume) have written "Marriage can sometimes be the loneliest place". Yes, "Private Life" is about a woman lost in a passionless marriage to a self-absorbed, misguided though well-meaning man. But it is about much more than just that. It is about choosing to adapt -- or not -- when the world goes crazy. It is about the role of friendship. It is about choosing to know yourself or not. Choosing to be true to yourself, or not. Choosing and the consequences of those choices.

From the viewpoint of technique, it is a masterclass. How to have your character speak a dialogue about one thing while thinking something completely different at the same time....how to find the appropriate narrative voice.....using third person narrative and still getting into all the characters' heads....how to portray the passage of time without leaving your reader to wonder where it all went. Plus, there's more than a smattering of cosmology and the evolution of scientific thought.

"Private Life" is an extraordinarily generous book. Smiley is an extraordinarily generous writer. If you don't know her work, it's high time you did. Buy this book.

Reviewed by Sue Guiney

Sue is the author of 'A Clash Of Innocents', 'Tangled Roots', 'Her Life Collected' and 'Dreams of May'.

She is published by Ward Wood, and you can find out more about her here and on her website.

You can read Sue's blog here.

My review of 'A Clash Of Innocents', which is one of the best books I've read in recent years, is here. And you can read a review of 'Tangled Roots' here.

Tangled Roots

by Sue Guiney

The myth of first novels is that they are autobiographical, coming of age stories about young people, with lots of domestic detail, dysfunctional families, and not much room for ideas. Sue Guiney’s first novel, Tangled Roots, has families, kitchens and coming of age moments, but beyond that it is a book about mortality, about the criss crossing of histories and the ways in which they flow together and apart. It is a book in which time itself is a central character. To quote the book’s epigraph: ‘If there is symmetry in our universe then who is to say that the stories of the past cannot coexist with the present, that the arrow of time can move in one direction only…’

John is a scientist who has come to a crisis point in his life, a point at which he must travel back in order to move forward. His story alternates with that of his mother, Grace, who re-lives her personal history and the history of her time. She is a woman who ‘survived tragedies and infidelities only to cheat death and rediscover life.’ These stories are intertwined in crystal clear prose that allows the reader to be the more moved in that it dos not dictate the response. The theme of mortality is present in both stories: the understated but heart wrenching death of a child, the end of a marriage, the maiming of a young woman. It is there in a rush of tenderness, a surge of anger, the inability to say the right words until the moment has passed. Grace says ‘ …everyone has a childhood. But you see perhaps it is not in the having. Perhaps it is in the remembering. Perhaps history is nothing more than everyone’s childhood all linked together.’ And in the remembering, time shifts again.

The minor characters are beautifully drawn, the settings , of Boston, Russia, London, Martha’s Vineyard and New York are skilfully and economically evoked, the Russian scenes being particularly vivid. I also enjoyed the descriptions of baseball, which are among the best pieces of writing in the book; the game creates a vivid sense of life and acts as both mirror and metaphor of the lives of the characters . This book engaged me on many levels, both as an engrossing story and as a thought-provoking meditation. An outstanding debut.

reviewed by Kate Beswick