FICTION The Senator's Wife By Sue Miller Bloomsbury 306pp, £10.99.WITH POLITICAL marriages, and in particular the wives of former politicians, very much the hot topic of late, Sue Miller's new novel, The Senator's Wife, feels timely indeed - almost self-consciously so as most of it is set back in the early 1990s, at the dawning of the Clinton era.
The novel tells the story of two very different marriages, lived out on both sides of a grand old house in a New England college town. Delia, the wife of the title, is a distinguished, attractive woman in her 70s, married to former senator Tom Naughton, a one-time Democrat hero. And although the two have led separate lives for over 20 years - he in Washington; she between the small town of Williston and her pied à terre in Paris - Tom is still the defining presence in Delia's life. Into her world - and the adjoining house - come Meri and Nathan, a couple in their 30s, just starting out in their marriage. Nathan, an ambitious academic, is in awe of the senator and Meri finds herself instantly drawn to his proud, spirited wife.
It's not surprising - Meri's own embittered mother was hardly a role model, and Delia represents a maternal figure she can aspire to, perhaps someone who can help her assimilate into her new life with her more socially advanced husband. The significance isn't lost on Meri, who straightaway recognises her attraction for what it is: "The attention of older women always does this to her. Makes her feel, somehow, blessed. This is what comes of maternal deprivation, she thinks."
As the months progress, Meri starts to learn more about Delia and Tom's marriage (by some rather devious means), and it's through her discoveries and Delia's own recollections that we learn about the betrayals and compromises that lie at the heart of the Naughtons' relationship, and of the book itself. In chapters that alternate between Meri and Delia's viewpoints, we're told about the numerous and ongoing affairs that drove Delia to leave Tom (including the most devastating one, with their daughter's best friend, embarked upon over a family Christmas), the unexpected freedom and fulfilment that their separation eventually brought to her, and their ongoing life together as sometime lovers.
While these stories are being revealed, Meri and Nathan settle into their new home and jobs, Meri becomes pregnant (albeit unexpectedly and reluctantly), and they learn to make compromises of their own. And herein lies the book's main theme: the bargains struck in every marriage - the sacrifices, the betrayals, the forgiveness, the devotion - that no one outside the relationship can know.
Miller, an extremely accomplished and successful writer (this is her eighth novel), draws her characters brilliantly, both physically and emotionally, and the self-awareness she endows them with allows her to illuminate the story with flashes of real emotional perception. Nor are they without their unpleasantness - Delia at times haughty and smug; Meri sly and secretive.
That said, the stream of reflection and self-analysis is occasionally in danger of becoming ponderous, and in a lesser writer's hands could be just plain dull. Similarly, the sensuousness of Miller's writing - her lyrical descriptions conjure up scenes in almost cinematic detail - can amount to overload at times: there are endless references to food (a flan is "cool and slippery"), smells (lilies have a "sweet, almost sexual odour"; mint "is the smell of happiness") and sensation ("he kissed her, bringing a pocket of warm air down around her"). Ultimately, though, Miller delivers on plot. When the charismatic but philandering Tom - largely absent from the story apart from in Delia's recollections - suffers a stroke, he is returned to her and to their home, and in a superbly paced final 50 pages, the various strands of the novel come together in an explosive, if rather depressing, finale.
As a study of betrayal and how it affects a marriage, The Senator's Wife pulls no punches - earnest it may be, but it does not sermonise, and allows enough ambiguity to make its characters' motives believable. And from the stories we know of real political marriages, it is certainly no stranger than the truth.
Catherine Heaney is features editor of The Gloss magazine