Jane Smiley 'Private Life'

Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 with her dazzling Shakespearean novel A Thousand Acres, but you would never guess she is capable of such a feat if all you knew of her work was the abominably dull Private Life, published in May. It picks up towards the end, but fully two-thirds of the novel is insufferably dreary, despite it's encompassing the Chicago World's Fair, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the First World War, and the stock market crash; Einstein, Japanese art, poker, and astronomy; the US Navy and the FBI; scholars in the University of Chicago and writers and editors at the San Francisco Examiner, gambling mothers, Russian anarchists, and lesbians who run around Europe with people like Henri Bergson. Perhaps if she had chosen to write from the perspective of someone for whom such matters were critical, or even significant, we might have had a more lively book, but her central character, the unfailingly decent and conventional Margaret Early is as boring and unimaginative as a person who is not actually brain-dead can be, so everything just chugs by her in a curiously meaningless way. Her unlived life might be poignant or even tragic given the right treatment, but Smiley gives us so little in the way of psychological exposition it's difficult to ascertain whether Margaret even registers her own disadvantages. The novel is mainly a story of loveless marriage, but there are several relationships besides which are described in enough detail to become tedious, since they all partake of Margaret Early's inexplicable absenteeism of the heart. Friends, cousins, neighbors all come and go without impact, without development, difficulty, commitment, or joy ... there is even a lover who falls back into the wings as quickly as he appears; their single tryst is disposed of in one short paragraph and described as "perfect", whatever that means. Margaret's one seeming bright patch is a tentatively explored aesthetic curiosity about Hokusai and other Japanese artists, but even this is undeveloped, insignificant either literally or metaphorically. The characters with whom her forays into art are associated are so poorly imagined they come across as embodiments of some Japanese design motif that Margaret, or possibly the author herself, has encountered in a magazine. Things start to get interesting in the last 70 pages or so, when Margaret acknowledges feelings of hatred for her foolish, bombastic husband, and we learn of his paranoid betrayals; the ending is surprising, moving because deeply felt (at last) and simply put, a sudden access of consciousness and memory which obliquely references her general condition - but it is too little and far too late.

If I have to imagine what Smiley is trying to achieve with this material, I would guess she is probing the restriction and inertia experienced by 'good' women whose options in 19th and early 20th Century America were so limited; also the consequences of enabling pompous and entitled men out of a misplaced sense of virtue; stylistically, she might be aiming for subtlety, minimalism, the drama of the ordinary (within extraordinary times). But she has imagined her dead-zone rather too well, so that in place of sympathy for any of these characters readers are left puzzling over why they were created at all. From a writer bold enough to update King Lear and pull it off with style, this novel about nobody and nothing in particular is a great disappointment.