The compromises of marriage

The Senator's Wife

By Sue Miller

Alfred A. Knopf / 306 pages / $24.95

Sue Miller wastes no time in setting up the tight yet troubling arc of her eighth novel, The Senator's Wife, about two women feeling their way through the peril and paradox of marriage. She conjures an attached townhouse and sets it in the quaint New England village of Williston. She fills the rooms with her main characters, then dollies in for an extreme close-up, from which vantage point we view their oddly parallel lives.

Meri and Nathan are newlyweds in a somewhat hasty, possibly shaky union. They've got sex and heat between them, but not much else. Nathan, a history professor, has a shot at tenure at the local college. Meri has given up her loft apartment and a job she liked to follow Nathan from the Midwestern town where they met and married to this new, uncharted life. The down payment on their half of the double townhouse is really a bet on their future.

The other house belongs to Delia and Tom Naughton, a retired senator and his wife. They're both in their 70s now, much further along on the journey their new neighbors have just begun. Tom's rarely home, his serial infidelity having eroded not just his senatorial career, but his marriage. He and Delia, though not divorced, now live separate lives. Tom lives in Washington, where he works for a fancy law firm. Delia divides her time between the Williston house and her cherished apartment in Paris.

As Nathan and Meri move in and unpack, as the sounds of their days and nights filter through the homes' common wall, Delia recalls her life with Tom. Though married in name only, they have reunited over the years. Sometimes it was for a Senate campaign, at other times for the sheer pleasure of being together. Tom may be a philanderer, but Delia's still the love of his life. Incapable of fidelity, he folds his wife into the ranks of the women he's driven to woo and win.

Here's Delia, recalling life on the campaign trail: "She surprised herself, though, by enjoying it, tentatively at first, and then fully, truly. But as she told herself, she'd always liked that part of political life with Tom - the long days moving around among people charmed by him, interested in him. The speeches, full of an idealism and passion that were Tom at his best. The late-night sessions with aides, the loose, easy humor, the relaxed public touching - his hand at her elbow, around her shoulders. His claiming her over and over: `My wife ... ,' `My wife ... ,' `My better half ... ' "