Fiction: Story remains the foundation of fiction, but themes are central. Love and war are probably the major ones: these are subjects worthy of art, because the best art is created by either love or war.
This may well be so, and such preoccupations confer an element of profundity on any narrative. But nothing scars and shames - and comforts - quite as profoundly as family. Sue Miller's tough new novel, Lost in the Forest considers family not as a unit joined together by shared pain but rather as individuals battling for their respective survival within the clans they are either born into or enter by marriage, and from which escape is always tricky.
It is a book of truths - or, put more accurately, tests. Miller is looking at realities. It is not all that easy to like this novel, but it is difficult not to believe it. The opening sequences test the reader as much as the characters. Initially, the narrative appears set to be yet another soft-bellied tale of love going wrong and, after a period of lamentation and regret, all being restored. By the second paragraph, an estranged father has received a phone call from his older daughter. "As usual, she didn't greet him, she didn't say hello at the start of the call.
"And also as usual, this bothered him, he felt a familiar pull of irritation at her voice, her tone . . . He kept his voice neutral." By the next paragraph, it is obvious that here is Mark, a distanced father who is preoccupied with thoughts and images of his ex-wife, such as "her sudden sexy smile". Characters are introduced and considered through the medium of their respective sexuality. The ex-wife, Eva, is presented as a figure of overwhelming physical grace and charm, her daughter, one of her two girls with Mark, is a copy of her. The complications emerge. The ex-wife has remarried, established another home and had a third child with a second husband, now stepfather to the girls she had with Mark. He is in exile, reduced to a visiting presence. Yet in a crisis, he has his uses, thanks to the demands of duty.
Miller's prose is precise, very detailed. She is interested in appearances. The sheer physicality of the narrative oppresses. Each character is photographed rather than sketched in. But there is none of the ease and comfort that flows so readily in the work of Anne Tyler or even Alice Hoffman who succeeds in balancing the domestic with the sinister. Miller is more deliberate than either Tyler or Hoffman, her vision is less sympathetic and her work is less beguiling. Nor does she ever quite arrive at the level of subtle understanding that marks the best of Carol Shields. Yet Miller, whose finest book, When I was Gone, is outstanding, is well served by a fatalistic intelligence. For a writer who tends to over-describe the physical she is cryptic. Her observations invariably upstage an imagination that is firmly rooted in the everyday.
Lost in the Forest is no casual title. The concept of "lost" is exposed and repeatedly explored and examined throughout the book. Eva and Mark, once partners in an ideal marriage, appear to have originally come together as lost souls at the wedding of friends. Eva had at the time been recovering from a disastrous romance with her college English professor. Eva and Mark marry but their love affair fails to survive the demands of young children and he looks elsewhere for comfort. His affair sustains him and in turn sharpens his interest in Eva. So much so that on ending his year-long affair, Mark feels he should share this piece of information with Eva. The sharing of the secret means nothing to her, but the betrayal does to the extent that she demands a divorce.
At times the writing is cloying. Miller hovers close to melodrama, she spends too much time inside the mind of her characters, particularly that of Mark. He seems besotted by his ex-wife whose second marriage appears to have given her everything he had failed to provide. Seven pages into the book, Emily, the older daughter reveals the extent of the crisis. Her stepfather has just been killed in a freak accident. The dream second marriage is no more. On hearing the news Mark "tried now to imagine John after the accident. Was his face damaged? His head? It must have been. How could it not? He imagined Eva kneeling, holding him. Eva, streaked with blood. He imagined himself, how he would have looked, lying there; and then Eva bending over him, wailing". Minutes earlier he had remembered the day he first spoke to Emily about her new husband and on offering his approval, his ex-wife bitterly replied, "Yes, I thought I'd try nice this time."
Throughout the book, Miller consistently allows Mark a level of intelligence he never reflects in any exchange. She refers to his "yearning" for what she describes as Eva's "panicked love". Eva, interestingly, is not presented as a heroine.
Instead, she is intent on making her life work. It is to Miller's credit that a novel that revolves upon characters seeking and invariably losing or merely settling for compromise, is populated by few sympathetic players.
It takes a trip home to Nebraska for Mark where he watches his mother, who has become aged through illness, for Miller to locate the emotional heart of the book. In a short but telling sequence as the supper dishes are being washed, the old woman is devastated at the loss of a large platter which shatters on the kitchen floor. It is as if the accumulated grief of her life is contained in the loss of the plate. "His mother stood, her hands empty, her face sagged in open-mouth shock. And then she wailed, a sound of such deep pain, such loss, that his hands lifted from the water in response."
It would be too easy - and disastrous for the novel - for Eva and Mark to retrieve their old relationship. Miller repeatedly demonstrates the mutual needs that underpin what pass for alliances, partnerships are sustained by compromise. The darkest aspects of the narrative concern the unhappy second daughter Daisy. This subplot not only takes over the book, it allows Miller to explore the nature of parenting and the vulnerability of childhood.
Duncan, a character straight out of the pages of Henry James, sits uneasily in Miller's world picture. However it is through this shocking initiation that she offsets what otherwise appeared a predictable domestic saga.
"Duncan was full of opinions". He is that and more, and disturbingly, less. He is the consummate voyeur. Although Miller's use of him as the catalyst that forces Mark into becoming a parent does not quite convince, the coldness of Duncan's opportunism is well handled. Lost in the Forest proves a chilling study of how we hide behind our social roles. Her heavy-handedly determined realism will unsettle, as will the weight of its psychology. Fortunately, however, its conclusion succeeds in dramatically countering the direction it could have taken. Miller is exacting and too obviously in control; the characters themselves become irrelevant. After all the blackness, the closing images of a small boy remembering his father flying skywards like an angel, or a damaged young woman preparing a clean, shiny floor for her lover, arrive as well-earned rewards rather than simple comforts.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Lost in the Forest By Sue Miller Bloomsbury, 247pp. £16.99
