This also ran as a book brief, but I thought I’d post the notice here, too, about Sue Miller’s winning the local Kate Chopin Award.

I’m posting the note and the review we ran in February of Miller’s book, ”The Senator’s Wife.”

The Kate Chopin Award, a St. Louis award, always goes to very interesting book that portrays a woman acting outside the conventions of society. Kathleen Nigro, who teaches at UMSL, has spearheaded this award from the beginning, helping choose books that often are a bit under the radar.

The first pick was “Stern Men” by Elizabeth Gilbert, who became much better known later with “Eat, Pray, Love.”  “Eat, Pray, Love” is a quirky life- and love-affirming travel memoir that really hit the best-seller lists when it became an Oprah pick. Gilbert’s novel “Stern Men” is delightful, as is her fascinating portrait in “The Last American Man,” about a guy who did things like learn to live in a teepee, hunt his own food, etc. The Kate Chopin Award (rather than Oprah!) was what made me interested in Gilbert.  Other award winners include the fabulous Margot Livesey, Ann Packer, Katharine Noel and Vendela Vida.

Anyway, here’s the news about Miller and the review of “The Senator’s Wife”:

Sue Miller, author of “The Senator’s Wife,” has won this year’s Kate Chopin Award.

She will be in St. Louis Oct. 9 to receive the annual award at the Kirkwood Public Library. A book discussion of “The Senator’s Wife” will be Sept. 25 at the library, 140 East Jefferson Street, Kirkwood.

Examining the deceit in the fictional couple’s marriage and life “should lead to a lively discussion not only of the compromises in marriage and friendship but also how those elements affect the world outside of that relationship,” says Kathleen B. Nigro, president of the Kate Chopin Society, which gives the award.

“Although there are some other criteria for the selection of the recipient, the main criterion is that the work portray a female character who defies cultural expectations to fulfill her own vision for her life. I want people to read this novel, so I will not say any more than that except to say that the main character, Delia, the senator’s wife, is decidedly not the woman who puts herself first.”

The award was inspired by St. Louis writer Kate Chopin, whose novel “The Awakening” scandalized some readers in 1899 with its story of an adulterous wife.

The review:

By Stephen Giegerich

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

With the exception of practicing mental health professionals, most will never know the intricacies of plumbing the innermost feelings of the human animal.
Fortunately, for the rest of us, Sue Miller is available to fill the breach.
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for “Family Pictures,” Miller anoints her novels with the innate ability to strip the insulation from every character, exposing their emotions for all to see.
Vivid and visceral, Miller’s writing is unflinchingly honest, no more so than in her portrayal of “The Senator’s Wife.”

A woman of notable intelligence and conviction, Delia Naughton is nonetheless defined by a tortuous relationship with estranged husband Tom Naughton, liberal stalwart of Vietnam and Watergate-era U.S. Senate, passionate defender of the downtrodden and shameless philanderer.

Written in alternating chapters by the book’s two protagonists, one being Delia, “The Senator’s Wife” tells the story of two marriages in an unnamed college town that bears a striking similarity to Williamstown, Mass.

The other is that of Meri, the newly wed and soon-to-be-pregnant wife of Nathan, a political science professor enamored from afar, albeit philosophically, by Tom Naughton’s charms.
It is Nathan’s infatuation that sets the scene: The couple’s purchase of an adjoining unit in the duplex Delia has occupied for 30 years.

But it’s Meri’s fascination with Delia – one that manages to exceed Nathan’s obsession with Tom – that informs this portentous and evocative novel.
Following the pattern established in her first novel, “The Good Mother,” relationships, in all their complexities, form the nexus of “The Senator’s Wife.” On that score, Miller is far from ambivalent.
“Isn’t that what marriage is all about?” Delia asks Nathan and Meri, “Staying in it while getting out in some way, too?”
From the outset, it’s clear that Meri will ultimately be drawn, one way or another, into the vortex of deceit and denial that defines the Naughtons’ marriage.
What’s unclear, as Miller steers the narrative toward its inevitable denouement, is whether Meri – unlike Delia – will emerge with her dignity intact.
Excelling at the disconnect between intellect and emotional intelligence, Miller has once again channeled the perfect character in Delia who observes, not for nothing, “One more or less loves one’s own messes.”
Indeed.