One desperate housewife

Published on Friday 18 April 2008 15:16

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller Canongate, 220pp, £9.99

REBECCA MILLER HAS one of the most impressive of CVs, both personally and professionally. The daughter of the great playwright Arthur Miller, she has won awards for her films and authored a highly acclaimed book, Personal Velocity. This latest work, although it sees her tackling mother-daughter conflict and female identity, also has a patriarchal presence that maybe shows a reluctance to let go fully of some influences in favour of others.

Pippa is a 50-year-old woman married to 80-year-old Herb, a hugely successful literary agent. They have two grown-up children, twins Ben and Grace. But Herb has decided he wants to sell their big townhouse and move to a retirement complex in the country, so here they are at the start of the novel, hosting a party for their friends in their new home, where every care is attended to and every possible disaster anticipated.

The problem is, of course, that Pippa isn't ready for a retirement complex. She spends her days thinking about what to cook for dinner, what to buy from the store and worrying about her daughter, a news photographer currently working in Afghanistan. And soon she starts to walk in her sleep, a sure sign of her unhappiness with her new situation.

This first part of the novel is the trickiest for Miller to pull off, and occasionally it shows – metaphors and similes seem laboured without yielding quite what they should. Portraying someone who is bored with their life but doesn't know how to fix it and make it a compelling read at the same time is not easy, and it's with some relief – I suspect possibly on the author's part too – that we turn to the second section, and Pippa-as-a-girl.

This comes alive where the first section struggles – Miller's poetic imagery works so well it seems effortless and at last there's a sense of intrigue: how did this troubled, angry young girl become a bored housewife, married to a man 30 years her senior, and whose career seems to have absorbed his every waking moment? Some of Pippa's early story is routine teenage troubles – routine for novels, that is. Her mother is addicted to pills, so Pippa rebels, leaves home, gets into drugs and dodgy sexual practices. By the time she meets the married Herb, who tells her she's a unique individual in New York because she has no ambition, we're already thinking, no, she's really not that unusual.

After this exploration of Pippa's younger years, we move back to the present and from here, the narrative races along. Although it's Pippa's problematic relationship with her mother that anchors the novel, and which gets most of Miller's attention, by this stage it really is her marriage that intrigues. I couldn't help thinking that, had Miller begun her novel with its ending – it's not giving too much away to say that we see her fleeing her children's comfort and possibly her husband's memorial service – the first section might have worked better. To have seen any woman behaving this way after the death of her husband right at the beginning of a story would have immediately set up the much-needed intrigue the first section of the novel lacks.

Taking marriage and mother-daughter relationships as her concerns here, and writing with what I think is a particularly feminine sensitivity and care, Miller has entered bravely into the territory dominated by women writers of immense intelligence, acuity and quiet power, such as the late Carol Shields, or Alice Munro or Anne Tyler. Miller may be the daughter of a great male playwright, but these women are her real literary forebears. She is not quite in their league yet, but she couldn't have picked better literary mothers in whose steps to follow.