Private Life by Jane Smiley

I looked forward to reading this book and had it reserved for me at the Library, but I must say, I was a bit disappointed, especially since one of Smiley's early books, A Thousand Acres, has always been a favorite of mine. It is a slow moving story, but in the end, I realized that it was probably Smiley's intention to tell the story that way to convey the slowness of Margaret's life and how she must have felt during her long marriage to a delusional and eccentric man.

This book tells the story of Margaret Mayfield and it begins in the late 1880's when she is just five years old. The story ends during WWII in 1942, so you experience Margaret's life over a long span. In essence, the story is of her marriage to Captain Andrew Early, a "brilliant" scientist in a fairly well-to-do family in St. Louis where the story begins. She marries late (for the times) at age 28.  Never is there a shred of evidence that there was any romance in her marriage at all.  And her childhood was spotted with tragedies - the death of two brothers and the suicide of her father. You realize early on that the title of the book has relevance; Margaret lives a very quiet and introspective life and takes what life has been dealt to her with acceptance, sacrificing her own urges and interests to her husband. She rarely stands up to him but just accepts his dictates and fanciful ideas without question.

After Margaret and the Captain marry, they move to the west coast, outside of San Francisco in Vallejo. I must say, I enjoyed the fact that most of the book takes place in an area that I love and am so familiar with. The novelist brings current events of the time  into the story - the Civil War, the 1905 earthquake in San Francisco, the first world war and then the second world war.

Out west, Margaret meets some interesting people who help to spice up her life a bit and she becomes close to a Japanese family and an odd Ukrainian man named Pete. Perhaps one of the most interesting characters in the book is Dora, from her home town, who stays single her whole life and travels all over the world as a news correspondent. Certainly, daring for a woman during that era.

A public hanging witnessed by Margaret when she was five years old is an event that is mentioned over and over again throughout the book and in the memory of it serves as a way to bring Margaret's life to closure.

It is written well, and has some passages that did captivate me, but overall, I was anxious to finish the book and move on to the next.