Best-selling author and Smith College professor Sue Miller has published one memoir and nine novels, two of which--The Good Mother (1986) and Inventing the Abbotts (1987)--have been made into movies. Also Reviewed Lost in the Forest ( Selection ) and The Senator's Wife ( ).
The Story: Four people wrestle with their reactions to a play, The Lake Shore Limited, following its Boston premier. Its creator, Wilhelmina (aka Billy), wrote the piece, about a man's oddly detached response to the news of his wife's death, as a means of coping with her own reaction to the death of her lover, Gus, in the 9/11 attacks six years before. Leslie, Gus's sister, has maintained ties with Billy, and, still mourning his loss, cannot accept what the play suggests about their relationship. Sam, a divorced architect invited to join Leslie and her husband at the premier, and Rafe, the play's lead, see disturbing parallels between the drama onstage and their own lives.
Knopf. 288 pages. $25.95. ISBN: 9780307264213
Boston Globe
"The Lake Shore Limited is craftily plotted, too good for a reviewer to give much of it away. Also, as with her previous novels, Miller resists allowing her characters the resources of eloquence; nor does she--in Henry James's words--‘go behind' them to offer us deeper truths about their behavior." William H. Pritchard
New York Times
"This is a book that does not depend on big, noisy plot developments, topical issues or deliberately withheld secrets to create suspense. Rather, its power grows from Ms. Miller's intimate understanding of her characters (for once, the men are as keenly and sympathetically portrayed as the women) and from her Chekhovian understanding of missed connections, lost opportunities, and closely held memories that mutate slowly over time." Michiko Kakutani
San Francisco Chronicle
"Her signature gift is to lay out intricate, discomfiting truths in graceful, clear sentences that never fail to engross and comfort. ... Richly layered, these self-examinations drive The Lake Shore Limited to a subtle, piquant, satisfying closing." Joan Frank
Seattle Times
"Miller is a remarkably graceful writer who sweeps you up in her flow of words, in her ability to make a character seem like someone we know. And there's a lovely house-of-mirrors effect in Miller's use of Billy's play as the book's story-within-a-story: We watch Billy and Rafe as they go through the process of creativity, wondering how close that might be to Miller's as she creates them." Moira Macdonald
Washington Post
"Miller's exquisite new novel, The Lake Shore Limited, is so sophisticated and thoughtful that it should either help redeem the term ‘women's literature' or free her from it once and for all. ... This is emotional terrain some people won't feel comfortable in, but it's gorgeously drawn and told with stark honesty." Ron Charles
NY Times Book Review
"The Lake Shore Limited is perhaps best appreciated as an extended character study. In places the prose drags, and there's too much filler detail, as if Miller weren't sure how to move the story forward without a proper plot. Still, the novel is worth reading for the ruthlessness of its revelations." Ligaya Mishan
USA Today
"The prose is plodding and overly ponderous, and the plot peters out to reveal--not all that much. Indeed, Billy's play, described nearly scene by scene, is far tauter than the novel that swallows it." Olivia Barker
Critical Summary
Miller's latest novel poses some compelling questions about relationships and the misguided assumptions and unreliable memories that underlie one's sense of self--and it offers some profound if unsettling answers. Critics varied in their assessments of Miller's prose, her use of the play as a story-within-a-story, and her plot, which boasts "no drama, no crisis, barely any action at all" (Washington Post). However, most agreed that Miller's complex, sympathetic characters are authentic and that their shifting viewpoints create "a haunting chamber-music piece with many different solos" (New York Times). Elegant and insightful, The Lake Shore Limited should perhaps be savored as a character study in the vein of Henry James--demanding but well worth the effort.