THE WORLD BELOW
By Sue Miller: Knopf, 2001, 275 pp., $25Oprah-anointed Sue Miller seems to write with an assumption that she is Everywoman's author, her female protago-nists personifying all female readers.
In some respects this could be true. She is capable of bringing out feelings, yearnings and events common to the "female experience," if there is one. However, her writings indicate that Ms. Miller must feel sure that every woman out there, from 20 to 60 or older, is ruled by her sex drive, as the ex-husband of her heroine in The World Below once commented (but his way of phrasing it was not even close to newspaper-printable).
I feel equally sure, speaking for the 30s set, that this is not the case. In fact, Ms. Miller's habitual reverting to sexual themes and too-explicit descriptions made me uncomfortable - and annoyed - enough to want to avoid her books in the future.
Catherine Hubbard is a 52-year-old twice-divorced mother of three grown children who decides to take an opportunity to revisit the past and possibly change her future when her grandmother's house falls into her hands. She takes a semester off from teaching in San Francisco and heads for the house in its small Vermont town.
The house and the memories of its beloved occupants take her back in time to her youth, when she lived there as a teenager with her grandmother and much-older grandfather, a country doctor. Cath had been left without a mother at a young age, just as her grandmother, Georgia, had. These similarities are just the starting point for Cath's examination of the other life events she shared with her grandmother, a strong, independent woman and wonderful storyteller.
In the attic, Cath discovers diaries and other records kept by Georgia and pieces together her youth and young married life, giving her a new perspective past the time when she knew her grandparents simply as dear older people who enjoyed an intimate, loving relationship, sometimes laced with undercurrents of conflict and old hurts. Georgia's diaries reveal her feelings after her mother died of cancer when she was a teen and of her life-changing experience in a tuberculosis sanatorium.
I can only imagine that Ms. Miller had heard stories from some real source about someone's experiences in a 1920s "san," because the fictional account is almost unbelievable. It would be extraordinary for her to make up what seems like an outlandish tale of sick adults, many married, behaving like children without much supervision and enjoying "free love" while trying to get well. Cath reads that her grandmother joined in on the licentiousness, a time of discovery that changed her outlook on life and distinctly affected her later marriage.
As Cath reflects on her own life, her failed marriages, disappointments, regrets, and the similarities and differences between what she has lived through and felt compared with her grandmother's life, she slowly tries to decide how to proceed with her future. There seem to be holes in her maturity and willingness to make certain choices to bring her true happiness, which is starkly contrasted with her grandmother. Perhaps this is not Ms. Miller's intention nor will it be viewed as such by other readers, but I was disappointed the character did not seem to grow in ways I would have expected.
Despite my personal annoyance and disappointments with The World Below, Ms. Miller does have a gift for bringing places and people into clear, colorful, lifelike view.
Cathy Carmode Lim is a former copy editor. She is seeking a publisher for a book of essays which she highlights the wisdom of her 4-year-old daughter.
