Private life, by Jane Smiley

The view of marriage in this new and well-reviewed novel is so bleak it did, indeed, make me wonder about Smiley's own experience of marriage. Margaret Mayfield is on the cusp of becoming an old maid at the age of 27 when she marries the brilliant but enigmatic scientist, Andrew Early. Scenes from post-Civil War Missouri, particularly the area around St. Louis and the 1904 World's Fair, enliven the early portions of the book which depict her girlhood. After marrying, the couple move to an island off San Francisco which is taken up with a naval base. A depiction of the horrors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which spares the island off its coast, but not all of those dear to her, is also well done. Her husband, brought up to believe in his own genius by his mother (one of the best portraits in the book), develops ever-stranger theories of the origins of the universe and becomes obsessed with Albert Einstein, who he considers an intellectual fraud, and later, during the twentieth century World Wars, a traitor and German spy. Margaret "stands by her man," even as his distorted view of reality destroys those around him that she loves. Stunningly depressing. 318 pp.