Lives, Overlapped: The Senator’s Wife

By Breanne Boland Februarry 7, 2008 Issue

In 1993, newly wed Meri and Nathan Fowler move into a house connecting to one inhabited by the wife of two-term senator Tom Naughton. Meri’s husband initiates the move. After less than a year of marriage, she abandons her long-established life so he could pursue his academic career elsewhere. Just as she’s settling into her new job and home, she unexpectedly becomes pregnant and begins a tumultuous, transitional year.

Delia Naughton, the senator’s elegant, estranged wife, lives in a carefully plotted map of traditions and scheduling: seasons in Paris, visits with her grown children, and rare encounters with her philandering husband. From outside, Meri admires Delia’s balanced life and studies her, wondering if she’ll ever achieve that kind of easy grace. With her career on hold and her body made foreign and unwieldy by her pregnancy, Meri can’t see it ever happening.

However, Delia’s orbits are soon to be permanently derailed. While Meri is uneasily adjusting to life as a mother, as something less than the wholly independent person she once was, an entirely different set of changes is occurring on the other side of the shared wall. Tom Naughton is felled by a stroke, and after decades of living apart, Delia leaps at the opportunity to become his caretaker. Their daughter balks, Delia’s friends advise otherwise, but Delia surprises herself by easily rearranging her solitary, independent life to accommodate the convalescing senator.

And so Meri’s and Delia’s lives begin a short period of parallel as they adapt to unexpected changes that will define the rest of their lives. Exhausted, disturbed Meri, saddled with the responsibilities that come with having an infant, looks to Delia for understanding and for inspiration. However, Delia’s polished dignity comes at a cost of compromise and long-earned acceptance — something Meri discovers when snooping through folders of letters while housesitting.

Delia’s most difficult times in her marriage happened when her husband was in office, when she had to be the adoring wife in the public eye. Consequently, she mastered the art of being personable while still remaining intensely private. Meri breaches this, and her ill-gained knowledge adds extra tension to her relationship with her neighbor. However, this pales in comparison to the wrench Meri’s uncertainty and insecurity will later throw into Delia’s already compromised life.

Sue Miller has created two realistic, intriguingly flawed female leads, two women who admire each other but who are too different to ever truly be friends. Without that easy, true connection, they affect each other in ways neither would have predicted upon their cordial introduction.

Meri is well aware of her character flaws; rather than using that knowledge to correct her actions, she instead uses it to narrate her journeys down dangerous paths. Delia has preserved herself through decades of the kinds of problems that would sink a lesser woman; when she makes a decision her friends and family unanimously judge as a horrible idea, she almost seems to feel she deserves to do what she wants after treading water so well for so long.

This brisk, engrossing book covers the short period of time in which Meri’s and Delia’s lives overlap and while their tale has a natural conclusion, Miller could have gone on for much longer, so skillfully does she unravel her story. Fortunately, she has a great sense of economy of story and resists the urge.

Two characters whose lives are plagued by questionable decisions could easily be a recipe for an unlikable cast meandering through an unmemorable plot. Instead, Miller has created a quick, delicious book with memorable characters, resonating situations, and a well-crafted and bittersweet conclusion.

The Senator’s Wife, 306 pages, Alfred A. Knopf. Available at bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers.

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