Book review: Private Life

Published on Friday 7 May 2010 20:22

PRIVATE LIFE by JANE SMILEY Faber, 340pp, £14.99

JANE SMILEY has never been one for the small story. Whether it's reworking the drama of King Lear or tackling America's pioneer history in her fiction, or penning huge digressions on the working of the novel, her vision has always been like her native country: an expansive one.

The title of this latest novel may contradict that sense of expansiveness, hinting at a more miniature view of the world through the private life of a marriage. But that is, of course, one of the biggest stories to be told.

And Smiley tells it against the backdrop of huge world events. Margaret's story begins in 1883 and will weave its way through two world wars. But it begins with personal tragedy: both her brothers, Lawrence and Ben, have died, the first from measles and the second from a childish game that went wrong. When Lawrence dies, Margaret's father, a doctor, kills himself. It marks the change in their fortunes: her mother moves back to her father's farm in Missouri, and the three sisters, Margaret, Beatrice and Elizabeth, are brought up to be useful, kind and – most important of all – marriageable.

Like a kind of Little Women, Smiley's tale focuses on the marriage prospects and successes of these three sisters: beautiful Beatrice commits first, then sparky Elizabeth. Margaret is left behind, too bookish and intelligent for the local men, until she meets – while out riding that new invention, a bicycle – the intimidating and wealthy Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. Early is a naval officer and an astronomer: he has ambitions to rival Darwin with his findings, and has the money to fund his research. Margaret is wooed by Early slowly and uncertainly, but eventually he proposes and they marry.

Which is when the real story that Smiley wants to tell can begin. Romances traditionally end when the heroine says, "I do". Smiley pulls back the curtain to expose what happens after that acceptance. What happens between two people, for instance, when they are forced to confront the tragedy of a miscarriage, then the death of a newborn child? We watch the slow failure of Early's scientific publications and Margaret's gradual disillusionment with him. We experience the failure of love and intimacy between two people and wonder what has caused it: the tragedies they have faced, the intellectual differences between them, the dishonesty about their feelings for one another in the first place?

This may sound like a gloomy analysis of a marriage, but Smiley is experienced enough to know how to keep gloom at bay. The exotic attractions of their friend, Cossack Pete, the Russian migr who is involved in all sorts of scams and projects, inject some much-needed light. And the literary adventures of Dora Bell, Margaret's independent-minded and feminist sister-in-law, flag up the political events that take place in the world at large. The irony of Margaret's situation is that she believed marriage would be an adventure too, that it would open doors closed to her as a single woman, and that aligning herself to an intellectual man would enlarge her world, not narrow it down. And yet, in middle age, we find her closeted in her home, spending endless hours typing up the latest manuscript her husband has decided will give him immortality.

Smiley stretches this already taut marriage to the point of breaking when Early becomes delusional, and reports their Japanese friends and neighbours to the authorities. His reports are made just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor: the subsequent attack means that the blameless Kimura family are taken away, an act which will surely mean the death of the frail Mrs Kimura, and this is the point where Smiley begins her novel. Margaret, the woman we have only just met, is at a holding centre, looking for her imprisoned friends.

The consequences of a bad marriage may not always be so tragic, but, Smiley seems to be saying, the waste of time, the waste of a life, the regret of never speaking up, of never walking away, are just as terrible a price to pay. Smiley is never hectoring or didactic: indeed, she weaves a truly spellbinding web as gently and as innocently as any unseen spirit might. Her author's hand, then, is as invisible as it should be. But she has a message to convey just the same, and it is not a pretty, or a comforting, one.