While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of While I Was Gone
Book Review: A Protracted and Formulaic Effort to Provide Palliation for the Silently Suffering WASP
Summary: 2 Stars
While I Was Gone, by Sue Miller, reads suspiciously like a blend of the steadily increasing numbers of this genre of WASP apologist novels. To my jaded eyes, these offensively scrupulous tales appear to be written for WASP C Average women college graduates of A plus incomes.
I am certain that many of these readers will consider themselves more well-read and better understood for having consumed a stack of this stuff by similar writers. Somehow, WASPS everywhere will feel that instead of being emotionally constipated and terminally civilized, that they are, as usual, better than everyone else who isn't like them.
The characters, including the animals, are for the most part, good-looking, privileged, educated, and eminently acceptable. Suspension of disbelief is just not happening here. This novel pays some token hommage to the strife of teenage parenting and the shoals of marriage. Yet, it remains smug and self-satisfied conveying beyond a shadow of a doubt that these superior folks are going to soldier on and become even better than they already are for having erred on the side of humanity.
Ugh! Just once it would have been nice to experience a character like Jo screaming at her minister husband Daniel to cease his sadistic sanctimonius silent cruelty and put himself in her place. Alas, no, that sort of low-class behaviour can never exist in the rarified world of the dazzlingly narcissictic humble.
I would exhort Sue Miller to redeem herself by writing about some low-born WASPS who know how to crochet toilet roll covers and make gloppy casseroles while drowning in some decently offensive hypocracy.
Book Review: hearty, soulful stuff
Summary: 4 Stars
This book was weird in the sense that, Jo is immediately so alien yet so understandable. A complex character, she embodies the every woman, with her seemingly perfect life. But with every page you realise how much like you she really is. She feels lost in herself, and her many roles,(lifes as she calls it}she feels that each is so seperate yet so easily does she fall from one to another. Her almost reckless abandonment of one life, in her youth for another, shows an almost schizophrenic personality division. She is running away to find herself. And yet, it is not over, in her middle age, when life is seemingly blissfull, she abandons the comfortable for the danger of the known past. So simply does the story unfold, with its onion-like layers, it makes you feel that I must have seen this coming. Mid-life crisis was never so dramatic. I feel the author is trying to convey a message; that life is a complex journey that has lessons to be learnt and everything that happens has a reason, and if the lesson has not been learnt, unresolved issues will come forward to pave the way.Book Review: For any woman going through her OWN mid-life crisis...
Summary: 5 Stars
Honestly, being in my 20's, I really didn't think I'd be able to connect w/Jo, but in traditional Sue Miller fashion, she found a way to weave the words & create literary opertunity in which eventually you find a way to connect w/the character because eventually, you are absorbed enough into their world that you are able to see through their eyes.
I was able to experience life though the eyes of a woman who was old enough to be my own mother, & get an understanding of what life is like once your 20's, 30's & even 40's have flown by.
What I found especially intriguing about the novel was how Jo just walked away from her life one day & began another one.
This novel is chalk full of twists & turns, w/an ending that won't leave you hanging.
Book Review: While I Was Gone
Summary: 3 Stars
An odd book about a successful woman named Jo who ran into the wife of an old flame. The meeting causes her to reflect back to a time when she was young and a free-spirit living in the 1960's. At that time she lived in a house, a commune-like setting that was shared with other young people, many of whom were students. As she reflects back, she is forced to remember the murder of one of her dear friends. The murder happened in the house one nite when the friend was alone with the old flame. She now has reason to suspect the old flame... how will it be if she confronts him now? Book Review: not bad...
Summary: 3 Stars
While reading the first 50 pages or so of this one, I felt like I was reading a book for women about twenty years older than me. I felt totally disengaged, bored. The writing didn't seem to connect with me, a reader in my early thirties. The dialogue between the main character Jo and her minister husband seemed so stilted and pretentious, arguing, for example, whether the feeling she was having was "admonitory" or "premonitory." Come on, I thought, no one talks like this! I did become more interested in the story when it shifted back to her wild, hippy days living in a commune-style house while on a break from her dull, married life. Again, the ridiculous vocabulary worked its way into her characters' lines, though, which just seemed like it was used to show how smart Miller is. It just didn't ring true at all and was very distracting from the story itself. I did find myself caring about the characters and thinking about them throughout the day when I wasn't reading. The ending was disappointing and unsatisfying. While I normally like things unresolved at the end of books, this ending just seemed like a cop out. Too simple, too... I don't know what. Just not what I was hoping for. Overall, not bad, but certainly a far cry from "good."