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Ellen Isaacs | |
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For Love takes place over the course of a summer in Boston. Lottie is struggling with her second marriage and she's using the summer to figure out what she wants. She and her grown son Ryan spend the summer preparing her childhood home for sale, while her husband Jack stays home in Chicago. Meanwhile, her brother Cameron rekindles his high school romance (obsession) with Elizabeth, who has since married but has returned to her parents house down the block from Lottie, also deciding whether to leave her husband. Elizabeth, who was never nice to Lottie as a teenager, tries to befriend Lottie, putting her in the middle of a difficult relationship between her and Cameron. Sue Miller's books tend to start the reader out in the middle of a story, and as the action progresses, we learn about the main character's past through flashbacks. She uses this technique here as well, and I think it generally works. In the first chapter, Cameron accidently runs over Elizabeth's au pair in a wild attempt to keep her from returning to her husband. That sets the stage to show us how this affects Lottie and what led to this event. Over the course of the book, we learn that Lottie met her second husband Jack while his wife was deeply ill and that their relationship is in many ways defined by the slow death of his wife. We learn that Lottie's father was arrested for embezzlement when she was a child, and she grew up with her alcoholic mother, both angry at her and guilty for being favored over Cameron. Yet Cameron has become the devoted one, looking after their mother as she deteriorates in the nursing home. We learn that Lottie takes pride in growing up without wealth, for having tacky taste, for not going the conventional route, and yet she chooses Jack, who is a doctor, with money and refined tastes. All of this (and more) figures in how Lottie eventually makes her decision and, perhaps, comes to accept herself. This is my third book by Sue Miller, and like her others, it has interesting and complex characters and it has many insights about human behavior. But while I found Lottie's journey is interesting, this book didn't affect me as much as While I Was Gone or The Good Mother. The story felt a little disjoint at times — it seemed like if you put the story back in chronological order, there would be some important periods missing. I sometimes felt that I didn't understood Lottie's emotional development and the reasons she made the choices she did. At the end, although I expected Lottie to make the decision she did, I didn't really understand why from her point of view. Still, I liked Lottie's unconventional ways and I appreciated the emotional complexity of her character. It's not my favorite of Miller's book, but I wasn't sorry I read it.
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