Private Life - Rilegato

“Smiley’s best novel yet . . . [a] heartbreaking, bitter, and gorgeous story of a woman’s life stunted by marriage . . . Nothing is confined about this ambitious novel itself, however. Smiley makes dazzling and meticulous use of her historical scope; the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the San Francisco earthquake, the World Wars, the influenza epidemic, the Japanese internment, the harnessing of electricity, the evolution of the automobile and the movies, Hearst and Einstein—all are gradually incorporated into her plot and themes. Even more admirable is her thoroughly convincing rendition of intimate details from the perspective of another era—the feeling of riding a bicycle when it was a new sensation, the subtle yet powerful machinations of a mother and future mother-in-law in arranging a marriage, the commonplace expectation of children’s deaths.”
—The Atlantic Monthly

“Extraordinarily powerful . . . In the course of this brilliantly imagined, carefully chiseled story, Smiley introduces a rich cast of characters. Among Margaret’s cohorts is a Japanese midwife who can virtually smell Margaret’s marital misalliance; an irresistible Cossack who says things like ‘Put your clothes on, darling, we’re going for a ride’; a sister-in-law journalist who is married to her work and counts as friends Ezra Pound and Henri Bergson. A gripping half-century of history strides through these pages, too. Lenin makes an appearance, as do Einstein, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. And then there is early 20th-century science in all its startling crudeness, a coming-of-age story of its own. Smiley’s virtuosity should be no surprise to us. She has proven herself in a dozen wildly different books . . . But Private Life is a quantum leap for this author, a book that . . . burrows deep into the psyche and stays. It kept me up all night, long after I’d finished it, remembering the lives of my mother and grandmothers, recalling every novel about women I had ever read, from Anna Karenina to My Antonia. In a fair world, it will get all the readers it deserves. It’s not often that a work as exceptional as this comes along in contemporary American letters.”
—Marie Arana, The Washington Post

“Birth and death—that ancient balance presides over Smiley’s panoramic portrait of Margaret Mayfield. . . . Deemed the least attractive of [her sisters], against all odds Margaret is rescued from spinsterhood by Captain Andrew Early, the reputedly brilliant son of a prominent local family. . . . Andrew is also subject to manias and delusions, and their intensification will provide the undercurrent of the novel’s plot. In 1905, Andrew and Margaret marry and head to San Francisco, where he has a posting at a naval observatory. Great things are in the works. Almost straightaway [however], there is tragedy. . . . But loss is only part of what divides Margaret and Andrew. . . . As time goes on, this troubled scientist has more and more difficulty drawing the line between world events and his own life. Smiley plays these scenes out gradually, finessing the increments that build domestic anxiety to extend and enrich her central concern: a fully fleshed portrait of the conflicted loyalties of a woman raised to be a submissive wife, a constant support to her husband. . . . Smiley understands that personal redemption is usually transacted within the deepest private self, [and] as the years pass, Private Life reflects the pressures of the larger world on the most intimate aspects of personal existence. . . . As World War II breaks out, Smiley lets events infiltrate her narrative even as she keeps Margaret’s marriage squarely in the foreground. Through every scene and revelation, she keeps in mind the moment she’s building toward: the completion of Margaret’s long-deferred self-recognition. What she finally delivers has a Jamesian twist of the unforeseen, but it’s achieved with a sureness of hand that’s all her own.”
—Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review

“Masterly . . . In this precise, compelling depiction of a singular woman, Smiley creates an inner world as expansive as her character’s outer world is constrained.”
—The New Yorker (June 14 & 21, 2010)

“With its quietly accruing power, [Private Life is] the kind of book that puts the lie to those who claim that great novelists produce their best work early and spend the rest of their lives gilding the lily. . . . The bulk of Private Life is devoted to the ways, large and small, that Margaret’s marriage shapes and circumscribes her life. It’s a remarkable portrait not only of Margaret but of her husband . . . Private Life is an unselfconsciously historical novel, in that the backdrops and events—in Missouri and then California—are never obtrusive yet fill every crevice of the story. . . . As in Marilynne Robinson’s luminous novel Gilead, Private Life’s protagonist is slow to act, a victim of self-limitations whose most dramatic events are internal and whose emotional wounds seem largely self-inflated. . . . Smiley has created in Margaret Mayfield an enduring character so faultlessly realized that her failures and self-doubt, her occasional small pleasures, and her moments of painful self-awareness feel inevitable and at times heart-wrenching. She is a woman of her times who scarcely struggles to rise above them—the kind of character who often gets shuffled off, in fiction’s pages, to inhabit a bit part. In the pages of Private Life she is given as full and honest and sympathetic an existence as she—as any of us—deserves.”
—Sarah L. Courteau, Chicago Tribune

“Not all tragic heroes are undone by hubris. The opposite quality can be just as devastating. Consider Margaret Mayfield Early in Jane Smiley’s haunting new novel, Private Life. . . . When she marries a local hero, the pairing has the aura of a small-town Cinderella story. . . . Smiley has proven expert at wedding the epic and the earthy, setting King Lear on a farm, for instance, in A Thousand Acres. In Private Life, she examines Margaret’s journey in the context of a vast, changing, troubled world. The conclusion is that even those who risk nothing cannot shield themselves from disappointment. [Margaret’s] keen mind and generous nature endear her to a colorful circle of friends and acquaintances. And they make her receptive to moments of joy, which Smiley evokes with delicate poignance. Supporting players are similarly vivid. . . . As for Capt. Early, Smiley refuses to make him a simple villain. Her increasingly nuanced portrait reveals a man who suffers as much for his dreams as his wife does for her lack of them. It’s this respect for the dignity of human struggle that makes Private Life at once unsettling and strangely uplifting.”
—Elysa Gardner, USA Today 

“A fine portrait. . . . Family relationships [are] depicted with a kind of loving frankness, a relish for their imperfections that acknowledges their capacity to sustain. . . . The narrative also makes room for comedy and minute social observation . . . Smiley unfussily and conscientiously enters a world beyond our experience and humanizes it, inhabiting it herself in order to allow us to follow her. . . . Andrew himself is an extraordinary creation . . . Smiley’s great achievement in a novel characterized by the quiet stillness of its depths is to thicken her narrative and empty it out at the same time. World events come and go, while Margaret’s isolation and her inability to act as participant rather than observer become steadily more pronounced. It is here that we can see the distinctiveness and refinement of Jane Smiley’s brand of realism. . . . What elevates this tale of a blisteringly unhappy marriage into something far more compelling and tragic is Smiley’s willingness to blend acute sympathy with outright absurdity and to juxtapose the relentless rigidity of human nature with the chanciness of the contexts it is required to accommodate. [Private Life] should only enhance Smiley’s reputation as one of the most innovative and accomplished writers currently at work.”
—Alex Clark, The Times Literary Supplement 

“A powerful turn-of-the-last-century American novel in both chronology and style. . . . Smiley has tried her hand at historical novels before but, at bottom, she has always been a master chronicler of the climate changes in relationships—I think especially of her great, great novella, The Age of Grief. Here, her compelling story about a long marriage has an Edith Wharton, Henry James feel of sinister delicacy about it. . . . A wistful and beautifully observed novel.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s “Fresh Air”  

“Brilliant . . . Set against the panorama of an America that emerges from the post-Civil War period into a world of discovery and invention. [Margaret Early’s] life is caught up in and buffeted by events as various as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the San Francisco earthquake, and the post-Pearl Harbor internment of Japanese immigrants and their children. Culture and politics are woven into the fabric of the story, not just as fascinating background, but as pressure on Margaret’s marriage. . . . A portrait of a woman suffocated by marriage with a man of distorted intellectualism and cold self-absorption. Nothing in this novel is easy or obvious or familiar. No adultery, no abuse, no abandonment. Private Life is a story of immense originality and insight. It is served well by the fascinating era in which it is set, and most of all by Smiley’s wit and erudition.”
—Sandra Scofield, The Philadelphia Inquirer 
 
“The breadth of Jane Smiley’s subject matter has always been astonishing—she’s written novels about farming, horse training, Hollywood and university life, and nonfiction books and essays about child rearing, impulse buying and dressing. In her 13th novel, Private Life, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Thousand Acres takes that breadth and applies it temporally, chronicling a woman’s life from the 1880s to World War II. The result is a novel rich in setting and scope. The novel begins in 1883 in Missouri with Margaret Mayfield, who is considered nearly an old maid at 27. Through creative matchmaking, she’s married off to Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early . . . Smiley’s main theme is the circumscribed life of a married woman at the turn of the century. Margaret’s plight is worsened by her obsessive, intellectual, ravenously egotistical husband . . . Andrew, with his passion for ideas, none of which pan out, emerges as one of Smiley’s strongest characters. . . . As Margaret manages to gain some sliver of freedom, the overwhelming feeling for her and the reader is one of regret and loss associated with a narrowly lived life. When Margaret says, ‘There are so many things that I should have dared before this,’ the reader can only nod her head in agreement.”
—Nina Schuyler, San Francisco Chronicle 

“Brilliant . . . Private Life is a powerful, challenging and, ultimately, fierce work of fiction, a masterpiece of a novel that stands with the best of Smiley’s work. It spans more than half a century, from the early 1880s to the attack on Pearl Harbor, revealing—not just in the details of everyday life but even in its style and narrative—the changes in the US during that time. Yet as we move from a world that would have been familiar to Louisa May Alcott—through scenes reminiscent of Booth Tarkington or Theodore Dreiser and into the darker intimacies of the 1940s—it is Margaret's life we follow, a life that is self-limiting and almost entirely unexpressed. All around her, fascinating creatures—her reporter friend, Dora, a shadowy figure named Pete, the enigmatic Kimura family—live out their destinies, but Margaret remains locked in a nightmarish marriage . . . Private Life reminds us that, for many, that holy sacrament was, and continues to be, a matter of solemn duty, where the strongest or most generous of the partners relinquishes all hope of self-realization in order to perpetuate a tired and unrealistic institution.”
—John Burnside, The Guardian (UK) 
 
“Smiley may have been born a century too late. Her best novels fit into the grand 19th-century tradition, with plenty of description, a sweeping view of history, characters from varied social classes, a strong sense of morality and an emphasis on the importance of the inner life. Private Life is one of her best novels. It follows Margaret Mayfield, daughter of a Missouri doctor, from her early childhood in the 1880s up through World War II. . . . It isn’t until she’s 27 that she marries a rich young astronomer with enough psychological problems for the two of them. . . . To a large extent, Private Life is a study of marriage and its drawbacks. In both tone and subject matter it’s easy to hear echoes of Middlemarch . . . Smiley’s sympathies are clearly with Margaret, but she doesn’t turn [her husband] into a pure villain: He’s right as often as he’s wrong, although nobody wants to listen to him. . . . Their lives are touched by history in believable ways: The San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 affect their family and friends, and the internment of the Japanese in the 1940s changes their lives even more radically. Smiley’s tone throughout the novel is compassionate, detached, and a little wry, keeping the events of these private lives in perspective without minimizing their importance to the characters themselves.”
—Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch 
 
“A book whose enormous power sneaks up on you. . . . What gives this painful story of an unhappy marriage its depth is Smiley’s refusal to assign blame. Despite his foolishness and pomposity, Andrew is not a villain. Nor is Margaret blameless. . . . Unlike so many contemporary novels, which start out sure-footed but eventually lose focus, this novel keeps getting better. It’s only May, but I am ready to place Private Life on my list of best books for 2010.”
—Nan Goldberg, Newark Star-Ledger 

“A chilling tale, quietly absorbing . . . Though the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the jailing of Japanese-Americans in World War II all figure prominently in Private Life, the title is right for a novel about spouses who grow further apart each year.”
—Craig Seligman, Bloomberg News
 
“Though touched by big events—the St. Louis World’s Fair, the San Francisco earthquake, World Wars I and II—Smiley’s story is primarily one of inner life. Its protagonist, Margaret, manages to be both exquisitely observant and dreamily self-contained. . . . A great deal does go on, distantly felt by Margaret, while her real interest, like ours, lies in the inner workings of her private life, which, for all its ostensible ordinariness, is rendered extraordinarily by Smiley’s subtle art. Along with the perfectly calibrated impressions and perceptions that so profoundly involve us in Margaret’s character and all that happens to her, Smiley gives us a convincing sense of life in Margaret’s time and place; every detail—the clothes and habits, news and rumors, passing fads ...

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as well as four works of nonfiction. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. She lives in Northern California.