Unlock Now The Lake Shore Limited Drafted By Sue Miller Available As Paperback

read this because Sue Miller is one of my fav authors, However, this is not one of her better books, She jumped on the.bandwagon and wrote a story with characters lacking in interesting traits, personalities, and lives,
There was not enough character development to make me care,
This is the first Sue Miller novel I've read, It took me awhile to get used to her style, but in the end it was worth it, This book was a reaction to the terrorist attacks on September,, Billy, the main character, lost her lover, Gus, who was killed when the plane he was on was flown into one of the twin towers.
But this wasn't a simple story about losing someone you love in a senseless act of terror, There were problems with Billy and Gus' relationship and those problems left Billy feeling confused and guilty, Since she was a playwright, she wrote a play about those feelings, The name of that play was The Lake Shore Limited, hence the name of the novel,

There were a couple of things that I found very unusual about Miller's style, First of all she included a great amount of detail that at first seemed superfluous, yet that detail seemed to push me into the characters' minds by emphasizing everything they might notice in their surroundings.
Secondly, Miller generally told her readers what her characters were thinking instead of letting us see reactions that would show us their thoughts, Here's an excerpt from the novel that shows both those techniques:

“Yeah,” Pierce answered, They were all standing now, They moved into the aisle among the others inching back to the lobby, Pierce kept his hand on her elbowa kind of sympathetic connection, she felt, She was grateful to him, but she was far away, She felt confused. Around her, she could hear others talking, speculating, commenting on the actors, on the arguments,

Some weren't. Some had shed the play quickly, were on to their own lives, She heard a voice say, “I wish I'd known it was going to rain today, I didn't bring an umbrella to work, ”

All of Miller's characters seemed to analyze their own emotions and situations as if their lives were one gigantic therapy session.
At the reception following a memorial service for Gus, Billy met a number of Gus' friends and colleagues who had heard about her through Gus.
She kept thinking how she should be honest and explain everything, including why she wasn't part of the service, But she didn't because she felt explaining herself would be selfaggrandizing, This was his memorial service, not hers, The strange way Billy's mind worked, combined with her lack of emotion was intriguing,

I loved the way the play within a book worked, The characters in the play were aspects of Billy and all part of her need to be honest about her feelings, Also, I've been involved in school theater and community theater for years, so I can identify with the backstage activity

Oddly, I finished reading this novel the week of the Boston Marathon bombings.


I plan to read more of Sue Miller's work,

Steve Lindahl author of Motherless Soul I know what this book is about but I still don't know why I continued to read it.
The characters are not very likeable, The story isn't very interesting and when I was done I was glad, In the past I have enjoyed Sue Miller but my opinion is changing, Her characters seem colder and difficult to care about even when you can see that the little kernel that is the base of the story has merit.
In this case how different people feel when a "loved one" dies in a big event, Of course all of those people waiting to find out if their loved one is alive or dead must think they should feel regret but surely more than we expect actually feel relief.
It just isn't politically correct to admit, That is the kernel of the story, I'm on a Sue Miller reading journey this year,having just discovered her writing and loving how she tells her stories, I'm working my way through all her books, Already ordered her next release in September of this year,
I enjoyed this book, but The Senator's Wife is still my personal favourite so far,
I felt I got to know each of the characters in this book, bot none really stuck with me, I did like the question of how to deal with someone who dies suddenly and tragically, someone who you'd intended to break up with and then what do you do Not tell his family Pretend you are grieving the loss too As always Miller dives into some pretty deep questions about life.

Each character in this book have their own issues they deal with,
This is a difficult one to sum up, I've always liked Sue Miller's books but this one's even more character based and introspective than most, I almost gave up in the first quarter Billy's a playwright who produces a work based on her personal experiences, the other key characters go to watch it or act in it, and the author describes the whole play.
I didn't think that worked particularly well, But the characterisation thereafter is excellent, and you get tremendously involved in the lives, loves and fears of Leslie, Rafe, Billy and Sam, Overall I enjoyed it, but it was a really slow and contemplative read and might not be everyone's cup of tea, There are several contenders Anita Shreve, Gail Godwin, but Sue Miller might be the best poster child for the poison condescension bestowed by the term "women's literature.
" She didn't publish her first novel, "The Good Mother", until she was in hers, but since then she's been prolific and popular another mark against her, writing about families and marriages, infidelity and divorce what we call "literary fiction" when men write about those things.
Last year, a grudging review of "The Senator's Wife" in That Other East Coast Newspaper claimed that Miller's novels "feature soapopera plots," a mischaracterization broad enough to apply to any story that doesn't involve space travel or machine guns.


Miller's exquisite new novel, "The Lake Shore Limited," is so sophisticated and thoughtful that it should either help redeem the term "women's literature" or free her from it once and for all.
Several times in these pages someone refers to the relentless psychological analysis found in Henry James's novels, which seems a far more relevant influence than TV soap operas.
In fact, "The Lake Shore Limited" may be the closest thing we'll get to a James response to/: no drama, no crisis, barely any action at all just a deeply affecting examination of the thoughts and feelings of four people still moving in the shadow of that tragedy.


The novel has an unusual structure: In the opening section, Leslie has traveled to Boston with her husband to see a new play called "The Lake Shore Limited.
" The playwright, a younger woman nicknamed Billy, was once the lover of Leslie's brother, and the two women have remained friends distant friends since he died in the Sept.
attacks six years earlier. Miller teases out the complicated feelings of affection and resistance between Leslie and Billy a little, but then the curtain rises, literally, and the play begins.


What follows for the nextpages is a stilted but oddly compelling drama about an intellectual man confronted by the news that his wife has just been killed in a Chicago subway bombing.
The play consists of several angry, intense conversations, Enflamed with grief, the man's son accuses his father of being grateful that he's free now to remarry, but then the man's mistress denounces him as unfeeling and cruel.
"It doesn't matter to you if she's dead, it doesn't matter to you," one of the characters says, half in amazement, half in accusation.
"You're so detached. " Everyone is baffled by this new widower's disaffection, his mysterious blankness in the face of a horrible tragedy,

Miller doesn't reproduce the script entirely, but she provides a vivid experience of the play, along with the quality of the actors' performances and Leslie's troubled reaction in the audience.
"Where did it come from" she wonders, "So much in this play, as in others she'd seen, came from things she knew about Billy, about her life, Why would she have imagined a thing like this It seems so ugly, so awful, really, "

The animus behind this play remains the heart of the novel, and if you commit to the considerable intellectual and emotional demands of "The Lake Shore Limited," it'll disrupt the equilibrium of your life, too.
The story moves back and forth in time but always returns to that performance, ending when the theatrical run draws to a close a

few weeks later.
Leslie can't get the play out of her mind and resists what it might suggest about Billy's relationship with her late brother, Billy, meanwhile, protests too much that the play contains no personal revelations, "Please, please, give me some credit," she begs a friend, "Give the imagination some credit, No one really does. No one believes in it anymore, Everything always has to be autobiographical, somehow, " But the more we see of her past life with Leslie's charming brother and the more she struggles to articulate her response to his death, the more we understand what inspired this drama.
"People think they know what you're feeling," she tells a friend, "What you must be feeling, And because it's easier not to expose yourself, what you're truly feeling, you don't disabuse them, You go through the motions for them, That's why, I think, I wanted to write the play about a man who doesn't feel what he's supposed to, "

Miller's insistent examination of that predicament grows increasingly profound and unsettling, The most moving response to the play comes from the lead actor, a man named Rafe, whose wife is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease.
Assuming the play is only about/, he doesn't realize at first how much it resonates with the dark tones of his own life, Flashbacks take us through Rafe's marriage, the grinding cruelty of his wife's illness and the ineffable mixture of joy and sorrow that characterizes their time together as the end approaches.
In one of several catchyourbreath scenes, his wife tells him, "It must be awful to sometimes wish me dead, " Dropping a statement like that into a moment of real intimacy while helping us understand how it can be both true and deceptive is the miracle of "The Lake Shore Limited.
"

This is emotional terrain some people won't feel comfortable in, but it's gorgeously drawn and told with stark honesty, The theatrical performance serves as a surprisingly effective stage for Miller's rueful reflection on what actors we all are and how unfairly we convict ourselves for the impurity of our affection.
Who doesn't, after all, "wish to imagine what life could be, how it could change, if you were unencumbered" That doesn't make us murderers or monsters, but it leaves us stuck, like Billy, "trying to calibrate her grief.
" There's some comfort in realizing the universality of that horrible calculation, and that's just one of the rewards of this novel,

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