‘Monogamy’ reveals conflicted emotions over a long marriage

Sue Miller’s latest novel paints a vivid portrait of a woman struggling with the death of her husband, and with knowledge of his infidelity. 

|
Courtesy of HarperCollins
“Monogamy” by Sue Miller, Harper, 352 pp.

What makes a good marriage? That’s the question driving Sue Miller’s 11th novel, “Monogamy.” And without spoiling anything, I can tell you that the book’s title isn’t the full answer for the couple in this story.

Beginning with “The Good Mother” in 1986, Miller has garnered a devoted readership for her character-driven, psychologically astute domestic novels, many of which delve deeply into how marriages and families work – or don’t. Fans will not be disappointed with “Monogamy,” an emotionally perceptive book that tracks a woman’s conflicted feelings about her long marriage following her husband’s sudden death. Miller’s first novel since “The Arsonist” (2014) hits many of her recurrent themes – including how impulsive behavior, sexual or otherwise, can fracture relationships, and how memories can change over time. 

Annie and Graham McFarlane are not an obvious match. When they first meet in their mid-30s at a party celebrating the opening of his bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, both are ashamed by the failures of their first marriages. Graham is outsized in every way – physically large, gregarious, Rabelaisian in his appetites and enthusiasm. Annie is petite and self-contained, a photographer sometimes accused of coldness or detachment. As their daughter Sarah later explains, “My mother holds it all in, my father lets it out.”

Annie is drawn to Graham’s joyfulness and “his honest embrace of pleasure,” but she sometimes finds him overwhelming and worries that he will consume her whole. 

A third party in their marriage is Graham’s first wife, Frieda, who left him because their open marriage and his many affairs were causing her too much pain. But Graham, “a person who never wasted a friendship, or a relationship,” has remained close with her, and, remarkably, Frieda and Annie have become good friends over the three decades of his second marriage.

“He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie,” Miller writes. “More careful and more faithful.” But, we learn in the next sentence, “not entirely faithful.” And that’s the rub. It’s also what’s troubling Graham on what turns out to be his last day alive: He feels bad about an impulsive affair that was meant to be a lighthearted fling but has turned into an albatross. He chastises himself for being “such a fat, sad, needy man.” Annie, missing the import of what he’s trying to tell her until much later, tries to jolly him. “I thought you were a fat, happy man,” she ribs.

Miller takes us through the waves of emotions Annie experiences after the shock of Graham’s death and her realization of his infidelity. Among them is rage – at both Graham and herself – for allowing herself to be subsumed by him. Her life feels shapeless, empty, depleted without his energy. If she’d been more separate and independent, she thinks, “Then she wouldn’t feel so hollowed-out now.”

There’s a lot of explication in the novel’s early scenes, backstories that are dutifully spelled out. But “Monogamy” pulls you in, especially when Miller shifts her sympathetic gaze from one McFarlane to another in tight third-person perspectives – Graham, Annie, Frieda, Frieda’s son Lucas, and Annie’s daughter Sarah. They all come to realize that, encouraged by Graham, they had relied on him too much. This is a novel that works not through dazzling images or narrative pyrotechnics but through the steady accretion of clear-eyed observations relayed in limpid prose. 

Miller captures Graham’s magnetism, a centrifugal force even in his absence. He’s a man who overcompensated for his unhappy, fatherless childhood – yet was unable to make up for the lack of affection from his abandoned, abusive mother. Annie comes to realize that “She could never have surrendered enough of herself to make it perfect for him.”

On her twisty road to a gentler, more straightforward grief, Annie recalls that her bookseller husband believed that reading fiction was consoling because it “suggests that life has a shape. ... That it has sequence and consequence,” which “made life seem to matter.” She also recalls that Graham called her an open book – not in an insulting way, but fondly, “A book, open to him.”

The key to a happy marriage, Miller’s moving story suggests, lies in just this: two people opening themselves up to one another – like inviting books.

In addition to The Christian Science Monitor, Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to ‘Monogamy’ reveals conflicted emotions over a long marriage
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2020/0917/Monogamy-reveals-conflicted-emotions-over-a-long-marriage
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe