Private Life (edition 2010)

Margaret Mayfield is, by the standards of her Missouri hometown, an old maid in her late twenties. She quite enjoyes her freedom, but there's something about Andrew Early that intrigues her, and and they end up getting married and she follows him to California where he has a navy job. It isn't an easy marriage, and he isn't an easy person to live with: a scientist with a head full of ideas and theories, a passionate desire to prove himself right and other people wrong, a sense of being belittled, patronised and persecuted, and over time Margaret comes to realise that although she has been supportive, she doesn't find his scientific arguments convincing. As years go by, she's feeling increased confined but finds joy in nature and friends, but his last paranoid investigation destroys part of that.

Bleak but engaging and very readable, and I really liked Margaret as a character. ( )

This book reminded me a little of the play A Doll's House by Ibsen. The difference is that the protagonist is from with the exception of place and time. Horrors of living through two wars and how these affect friends and relatives are explored. Reader was good. ( )

The author was smart to give you some of the ending of the story at the beginning of the book (hint for all those who sin by reading the last pages or chapter first: the author makes you do so here, so don't bother). The story then goes back (40-50? years) and starts at the "beginning." The names and objects mentioned in the prologue are the only things really that helped pull me through the book. As the items are encountered you almost check them off. Otherwise there is little overt conflict to propel the story. It's simply the account of one woman's life, mostly regarding her dull marriage to a astronomer/physicist who sees conspiracy theories around him. Her character is very interesting, and there a good sense of the history of the time period (late 1800/early 1900), but it's nothing too exciting. ( )

Some beautiful prose...but overall a bit slow. ( )

A quiet story of Margaret Mayfield’s marriage to Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. Almost an old maid, Margaret’s marriage to “the most famous man their Missouri town has ever produced” is slowed unravelled. Smiley gradually lays bare the hollow barrenness of Margaret’s marriage, and Margaret’s slow growing recognition of her husband’s true nature and how the world, her friends, and the wider community perceives him, of how she is trapped “no recourse of any kind, no way out, no one to talk to about it, not even any way to look at it all that gave relief”.
The book is encased at either end by a devastating betrayal as her husbands’ actions destroy one of the few friendships she has built. ( )