Monogamy, by Sue Miller

Miller writes so well about marriage and family relationships, and her characterizations of even minor characters (a cat, an elderly neighbor, her stepson’s new toddler daughter) are spot on. When Annie meets Graham at the opening of his new bookstore in Cambridge, both have been divorced from earlier youthful marriages. The connection between the small, introverted photographer and the large, gregarious extrovert Graham is immediate and will soon lead to their marriage and a blended family that comes to include Graham’s son Lucas, his ex-wife Frieda, and their own daughter, Sarah. After thirty happy years (with one brief early lapse on Graham’s part), Annie and the extended family are stunned and grieved when he dies in his sleep of a heart attack. But the reader knows, from the early chapters, that Graham had recently been unfaithful again, somewhat reluctantly but complicitly, with a mutual friend. Months later, Annie comes upon this former lover (with whom he had broken things off the day he died, and after confessing his slip to his oldest friend) sobbing in Graham’s study at a memorial reception at their home. She guesses, but does not know the whole story, that he has strayed. In the second half of the book, Annie struggles with her pain and anger, on top of her very real grief, at this complete reversal of what she thought she understood about their, and their family’s, relationships. Much as I liked the book and the writing, I must admit in the end I was somewhat disturbed by Miller’s treatment of her female characters. Frieda, the ex-wife, remains friends with Graham after she leaves their “open” 60s marriage (open, seemingly, only to Graham). She becomes, in fact, Annie’s dear friend too. These close relationships will, in fact, hampered her own ability to forge a new life. Sarah, who inherited Graham’s size, not so attractive in a woman, adored her father but doubts her ability to find adult love. Annie, in addition to her anger at learning of Graham’s recent affair, is humiliated late in the book by the reappearance of an author she met and had a mild flirtation with at the McDowell art colony early in her marriage. Graham, dead or alive, remains the center of the book despite Annie appearing to be so. His influence has in many ways stunted the growth of the women around him despite their genuine love for him. 338 pp.