Private Life »

Jane Smiley's power as a writer lies in her ability to evoke her chosen milieu, no matter how far-flung. The Pulitzer winner is able to vary her settings -- from 14th-century Greenland to a modern-day college campus -- as well as her tone, never missing a beat.

A riveting new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winner that traverses the intimate landscape of one woman’s life, from the 1880s to World War II.

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven in post–Civil War Missouri when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He’s the most famous man their small town has ever produced: a naval officer and a brilliant astronomer—a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret’s mother calls the match “a piece of luck.”

Margaret is a good girl who has been raised to marry, yet Andrew confounds her expectations from the moment their train leaves for his naval base in faraway California. Soon she comes to understand that his devotion to science leaves precious little room for anything, or anyone, else. When personal tragedies strike and when national crises envelop the country, Margaret stands by her husband. But as World War II approaches, Andrew’s obsessions take a different, darker turn, and Margaret is forced to reconsider the life she has so carefully constructed.

Private Life is a beautiful evocation of a woman’s inner world: of the little girl within the hopeful bride, of the young woman filled with yearning, and of the faithful wife who comes to harbor a dangerous secret. But it is also a heartbreaking portrait of marriage and the mysteries that endure even in lives lived side by side; a wondrously evocative historical panorama; and, above all, a masterly, unforgettable novel from one of our finest storytellers.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Not surprisingly, this is by no means the first time that thrice-divorced Smiley has focused on a troubled marriage or voiced doubts about the institution as a whole. In her beautifully nuanced early novellas, The Age of Grief, Ordinary Love, and Good Will -- still, along with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, my favorites among her books -- she explored the vagaries and complexity of marital love and family life. Although featuring contemporary settings, the novellas share with Private Life the theme that matrimony is essentially a private affair, unknowable from the outside (and often puzzling enough from the inside, as well). But Private Life makes the further case that how one conducts oneself in even this most intimate and private of relationships can have significant moral consequences in the public domain.