The World Below
By Sue Miller. Alfred A. Knopf, 275 pages, $25.

ROMANCE AND REALITY: Miller flexes her descriptive muscle in this almost too tightly constructed tale.

There’s enough water in Sue Miller’s new novel to float a fleet of ships. Streams, rivers, rains, and reservoirs run through the book’s physical and psychological landscape, to say nothing of the deluge caused by her characters’ frequent bouts of weeping. The World Below continues Miller’s unabashedly emotional examination of domestic life, a territory explored in The Good Mother and Family Pictures. In this latest effort, the deceptively simple nouns that are Miller’s stock and trade — home, marriage, love, family — are probed and scrutinized through the watery, at times distorting, medium of memory.

Cath is the book’s chief investigator; a 52-year-old mother of three grown children, she’s resting in the lull of recovery after her second divorce. When a letter informs her that a great aunt has died and left her and her brother their grandparents’ Vermont property, it seems a good time to take a leave from her job as a high-school teacher in San Francisco and make a pilgrimage East to rediscover the place that represents home for her more than any other.

Such ancestral journeys are the perfect set-up for revelatory moments of self-knowledge, and Cath’s is no exception. The difference is that this particular home has more than the usual amount of emotional baggage, since the previous occasions for coming to live with her grandparents — once at the age of 7, then again when she was 15 — were her mother’s mental breakdown and eventual suicide. Cath’s grandmother, Georgia, also lost her mother at the age of 15, after a long, ugly fight with cancer. This bond between the two women’s lives is the point from which Miller casts her narrative, sending out lines that weave together past and present while crossing from West Coast to East and back again.

When Cath discovers a box of her grandmother’s diaries, she submerges herself in the process of recovering and re-evaluating the past. She soon realizes that the rose-colored memories of her grandparents’ marriage have been influenced by the shortcomings of her own relationships. " I took the pieces I knew of their story and made from them a great and uncomplicated romance, a thing of deep and enduring fidelity and devotion, which I heard in my head in my grandmother’s rhythmic, storytelling voice. " What begins to unfold in its place is a union that Cath discovers was built as much on compromise and misunderstanding as on love and acceptance.

Vividly rendered scenes from Georgia’s youth flesh out the primly composed tidbits of her diary, and they allow Miller to flex her descriptive muscle. Much of this parallel story takes place in the tuberculosis sanatorium where Georgia has been sent by Dr. Holbrooke, the avuncular family doctor she will marry one day. First, however, she meets Seward, the doomed young man who becomes her lover. Their trysts in the " san, " which take place between claustrophobic stretches of enforced rest, are depicted with bodice-ripping urgency: " As she straightened beneath the leafy tent, his arms encircled her, she felt his breath hot on her cheek, her neck. And then, for the first time, he kissed her, his lips hard, pressing into hers, his entire bony body embracing hers. He smelled of his illness, of the brown soap they used at Bryce, of mentholatum, of rain, of flesh and fever heat. Georgia rose to her toes to push her body against his in hunger and terror and a kind of willed abandon. "

As she pieces together a surprising new picture of her grandmother’s life, Cath has ample opportunity to mull over her own past loves and even to contemplate potential romance with Samuel, a gentlemanly retired professor. Acknowledging the link between this budding relationship and her grandmother’s eventual marriage to the elder Dr. Holbrooke, she recognizes a deepening connection with Georgia’s past: " As my life unfolded in Vermont . . . I was living her life too, it was running steady as a buried stream under mine. " Despite these ties, Cath is jolted into the present when her daughter delivers a dangerously premature baby back in California. The past is another country; as much as it informs the present, she’s needed at what she now realizes is her true home.

It’s hard not to admire the tight, clean construction of Miller’s work as she brings Cath’s quest full circle, but it’s possible to feel hemmed in by it as well. Some readers (Oprah Winfrey comes to mind) won’t mind being marched along, or having an already obvious insight echoed meaningfully in characters’ dialogue. Others may wish Miller had allowed them the same slow pleasure of discovery that Cath enjoys.

Sue Miller reads at the Arthur M. Sackler Auditorium, 485 Broadway in Harvard Square, next Thursday, October 18, at 6 p.m. Call (617) 661-1515.

Issue Date: October 11 - 18, 2001