The World Below (2001)

Good intentions can change another person's life, but this change may not always be welcome. When the mother of two girls dies, their grandmother arrives to take them back to her rural home. Their father refuses the offer; privately, the girls laugh at the notion of living with their backwoods relative. But she was right. Caring for their widowed father would prove to be a great sacrifice. They probably would have been better off with the freedom their grandmother's care could have provided.

Years later, when the elder daughter becomes ill, her doctor sends her away to a sanatorium for her health. When she returns, the two marry. After several decades together she discovers that she wasn't really sick enough to warrant the sanatorium. Her husband sent her because he thought it would be best, because he thought she needed to escape the life she had taking care of her father.

She is not grateful for his intervention. She liked the life she had. The doctor's well intended gesture had changed her life forever.

Years later, the doctor will do the same for his grand-daughter by sending her to Paris to live with her aunt. There she will discover a side of the grandmother who has raised her that she never suspected.

Sue Miller writes about the ways relationships can be complicated by simple acts and by dramatic ones. Sometimes these are one in the same. In The World Below some characters reveal their past lives, others are discovered, but no one is who we think they are, not entirely. Everyone has a history. Discovering it can be painful, revealing it can be cruel.

Ms. Miller understands the complexities of people and the relationship they form. She understands that even happy families struggle to maintain their relationships. Her work proves Tolstoy wrong, happy families are not all alike. You just have to look a bit harder, get to know them intimately. Families are complex things. For love to survive, some things must be revealed, some things are best kept secret. ( )

I enjoyed this book. It told an interesting story with bits of history and culture that were new to me and fascinating. Also, Sue Miller surely has a way with words; her writing is smooth and engaging. I could, however, have done without the gratuitous self-sex scene at the beginning of the book. I think I understand why she included it, but it was unnecessary, bordering on tasteless, and really out of place. Otherwise the book was an enjoyable read. ( )

This is a compelling novel about a woman who returns to the home of her deceased grandparents following her divorce to recapture the peace and belonging that she once knew as a child. She remembers her grandmother through her diaries and her own memories. The grandmother's story of being hospitalized in a sanitorium for tb patients and her subsequent marriage to her doctor. The diaries reveal details of her grandmother's life previously unknown to the woman. It is a story within a story and told in Sue Miller's signature excellent style. ( )

This book is the story of a grandmother and her adult granddaughter. The grandmother's story was fabulous, while the granddaughter's story was a yawner. ( )

I read this a long time ago, but forgot it and took it out of the library. Which probably says something about my evaluation of the book.. Anyway, not up to The Good Mother or While You Gone, which have stuck in my mind. Sue Miller reminds me of Alice Hoffman--mileage varies, not quite up to the standard of Jane Smiley, but then who is?

This is the one where divorced woman goes back to home of her grandmother in New England and discovers grandmother's lost secret. Something about a town flooded by a dam.