Private Life

A young woman marries an older man who later turns out to be a hopeless idiot. Though he considers himself an authority on all things scientific, he is completely out of touch with the changing scientific landscape. As he ages into his sixties he becomes completely senile and paranoid while his young wife finds herself more and more trapped by his dominating presence. Set in San Francisco. A story with a strong sense of time and place.

It's not that I didn't enjoy the audio version in giving this only 3 stars--it's just that Andrew's "work" became very tiresome within the story of Margaret's "wifedom." Probably the detailed extent of Andrew's work made the overwhelming nature of it in relation to Margaret's part in the marriage all that more, ultimately, tragic. Andrew seemed just so incredibly impossible. They lived such separate lives, probably all too realistic for the times. I wanted to find out what would happen but it was sort of an exhausting listening experience in the end.

I read this back in 2010 and again in 2015, being utterly determined to read everything Jane Smiley ever wrote. The book is a remarkable exploration of an unsuccessful marriage, from 1883 to WWII, of a driven scientist, Captain Early, and his wife Margaret. From St. Louis to Vallejo, California, the Captain expounds on his scientific theories and Margaret types his manuscripts. Along the way, she discovers brilliant people - her cousin Dora, a reporter, Dora's friend Pete, a Russian whose many storied lives cross continents and governments, and the Kimura family, artists and midwives. But she can never quite grow and develop herself due to the stranglehold of her husband and her inability to dismiss him.The most touching passages are found letters from her mother-in-law to her husband, in which Mrs. Early rues her son's lack of sanity and wisdom. Her loss is a monumental tragedy. And Margaret's observations of a family of coots, formed by her newly engaged love of Japanese brushwork through the Kimuras, are deeply profound and memorable.Well worth a second reading!

Smiley's portrayal of a marriage between a woman with few options and an egotistic and foolish man is so well drawn it just almost painful to read at times. I don't think I have ever read any novel with a character such as Andrew Early. His narcissistic personality is disgusting; at times the reader doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Margaret's submission to his vain and foolish ideas seems absurd, yet considering the time and culture, what could she do. It is easy to say that she should have found a way to get out of that stifling marriage (especially considering the role model of Dora), but Margaret simply deals with it and "makes the best of it." Making the best of it might seem to be a weakness, but in many ways it is a strength. She does not drop into depression. Instead she seeks out the friendship of other women, the Japanese family, and gives into what seems to be a "one night/afternoon stand" with Pete. Her alternatives could easily have been worse.The backdrop of the Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake, the internment of the Japanese all provide a colorful and interesting canvas to tell this story. It is a good blend of historical fiction with a intimate look at a private life of a very different man and woman. In short -- loved this book.

Private Life primarily follows the life of Margaret Mayfield spanning her life in the generation following the Civil War up to World War II. After the childhood deaths of two of her brothers and her father, there was now a pressing need for Margaret and her sisters to be married off. Through the machinations of her mother and future mother in law, she was attached to a locally renowned scholar and astronomer several years her senior. Andrew Early was socially awkward, but this was chalked up to his being a genius. Margaret was drawn to his strangeness in a way and in her naïveté and the fact that she was nearing the age of being forever labeled an old maid, she felt relieved to have been chosen by him. Her fascination with his genius, which he displayed at any opportunity, soon gave way to the realization that his self-interests would always overshadow her. Her life now centered around him. There was no physical or emotional passion between them, other than brief moments when he was stirred by a spark of new discovery related to his work causing him to feel more amorous toward his wife. Over the years, she became frustrated with Andrew's obsessiveness and incessant need to always be right. He burned bridges with former colleagues and employers by one-upping them or correcting their work and insisting they were wrong. After someone close to him was killed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he focused all his attentions on the earthquake itself and the hows and wheres of the damage it caused. He was obsessed with a decades-long (one-sided) dispute with Albert Einstein over his quantum theory. In his later years, he considered himself a bit of a sleuth and spied on Japanese Americans he thought were partaking in suspicious activities, passing (unwanted and inaccurate) information onto the government. In doing so, he betrayed close friends, including a Japanese family Margaret enjoyed spending time with, as well as including unfounded suspicions that his own wife was being used unwittingly to transport information. (Nail. Coffin.)Margaret only had a couple moments of rebellion against her husband, neither one being worth the effort. She was destined to live a life of grey.This has beautiful writing which makes the reading of it pleasant, but the story itself is rather uneventful. I did enjoy the portions of the book which covered true historical events, i.e. the San Francisco earthquake and the internment of Japanese Americans at a former racetrack called Tanforan, outside of the city. There is a quote used by the author in the epigraph taken from Rose Wilder Lane's Old Home Town: "In those days all stories ended with the wedding." Because most of this particular story centers around Margaret Early's rather mundane married life, I think the author may have been trying to warn readers of what lies ahead as they embark on their reading. Pleasant but dull.

“Private Life” by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley is a third-person narrated account of the life -- from the age of five in 1883 to the age of 64 in 1942 -- of an accommodating, submissive woman, Margaret (Mayfield) Early, who, finally, out of necessity must assert herself. I felt that Smiley’s narration, a consequence of Margaret’s compliant nature, lacked excitement until maybe a fourth of the way into the book when she marries her husband, Captain Andrew Early, an egotistical astronomer and physicist. I empathized more and more with Margaret’s character as her dissatisfaction with Andrew progressed.People late in life tend to judge their past lives in terms of accomplishment and fulfillment. Margaret’s judgment becomes one of bitterness, toward those who have manipulated and controlled her and toward her own cowardice of accommodation. Accomplishment requires courage. Fulfillment requires contentment with outcomes and with oneself as a human being. Throughout most of the novel Margaret lacks the courage to forge her identity and determine her future. She has allowed stronger-minded individuals to control her. Her enjoyments result from her associations with strong-minded yet considerate acquaintances: her eccentric, exciting sister-in-law Dora; Mrs. Lear, a neighbor and wise advisor at Mare Island Naval Base, Calfironia; Mrs. Wareham, a compassionate boarding house landlady in Vallejo, California; Pete Krizenko, an adventurous, mysterious Ukrainian entrepreneur for whom Margaret feels an emotional and sexual attraction; and the Kimura family – the aging father, an exquisite painter; the mother, a tireless, traveling midwife; and the daughter Naoko, a trustworthy midwife and housekeeper.At the beginning of Part One of the novel we learn that Margaret, living near St. Louis, Missouri, has repressed her memory of a public hanging that her older brother had taken her to witness when she was five years old. Both of her brothers die during her childhood. Margaret’s father, a physician, kills himself. Margaret’s mother Lavinia moves her family to her father’s nearby farm where they reside until her three daughters marry. From an early age Margaret learns resignation. Lavinia considers Margaret, at age 23, to be lazy because she is content to read books rather than assert herself to attract suitors. Daughters of several of Lavinia’s friends have taken school teacher jobs in Idaho to find husbands. Margaret tells Pete Krizenko fairly late in the novel: “I was the third sister even though I’m the oldest. There’s always a beautiful sister and a smart sister, and then there’s a sister that’s not beautiful or smart.” Lavinia places her daughters Elizabeth and Beatrice in social circles where their attributes attract eventual husbands. Margaret appears destined to be an old maid. However, Mrs. Jared Early, a rich, seemingly generous, well-educated widow and elitist member of high St. Louis society, befriends Lavinia, and, ultimately, Margaret. Her son, Andrew Early, educated at Columbia and the University of Berlin, and recently a professor at the University of Chicago, visits St. Louis. Mrs. Early arranges for Lavinia and Margaret to spend a fiercely cold winter night at her residence. Andrew is present. Margaret had met him by chance briefly several years before. Margaret experiences “the distinct feeling of staring into her own future … The play had begun. The customary ending was promised. Her own role was to say her lines sincerely and with appropriate feeling. At her age, she thought, she should know what those feelings were, but she did not.”In the spring of 1903 Mrs. Early arranges to have her son and Margaret tour the exposition grounds of the 100th year celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. Margaret recognizes that “he was not exactly like other mortals—he knew more, saw more. His mind worked more quickly and surveyed a broader landscape.” Submitting to the wishes of her mother and Mrs. Early, Margaret persuades herself to believe that, unlike other couples, they could share a unique life. He leaves St. Louis to spend several weeks in Washington, D.C. Afterward, he travels to Arizona and California. Lavinia advises patience. Eventually he returns and proposes. Thus begins their unique, increasingly unhappy marriage. Years later Margaret discovers several letters that Mrs. Early had written to Andrew about the purpose of the marriage. "Our thoughts about certain persons here in this town may not have come to anything (though the girl and her mother still seem receptive enough), but there are other girls and other mothers. My very least favorite thought is that of you solitary and alone, with no companion and no one to care for you. … No, the girl is not educated nor evidently intelligent, quiet without being mysterious (though I think there is more to her than meets the eye), but what do you want in a wife at your age? [He was 38, she 27] … I do not, frankly, think that you could abide a rival or even a young woman who considered herself your equal and spoke her own ideas back to you with any sort of self-confidence. … This girl is a well-made young woman with proper instincts and reasonable connections. Her mother has trained her to take care of household matters."Telling Margaret’s thoughts, the author narrates: “in the end, Mrs. Early carried her point—she had chosen the local old maid, harmless but useful, to marry and care for her darling son” and that Lavinia had been “in on the plot. … Not only had he [Andrew] entertained doubts about her, he had tried her out, seen that he could have her, and then doubted and hesitated and suffered before taking her as the least of evils.”Margaret learns that Andrew is actually two men. “When he was wondering [his greatest talent], he was a likable, congenial, and sociable person. When he had stopped wondering and was convinced that he knew the answer, he became stubborn and stern.” Before their marriage, while he was at Columbia and Chicago, he had challenged his superiors’ theories and made enemies. Married to Margaret, forced thereafter to work independently of academia, at a naval observatory at Mare Island, California, he spends most of the next three and a half decades of his life seeking to achieve scientific world acclaim. He writes numerous newspaper and scientific journal articles; he makes speeches; he writes lengthy books about the universe. “Private Life” is as much a portrait of an unstable genius who, craving adulation and not receiving it, becomes delusional and callously destructive as it is the portrait of a not remarkable, submissive, but decent woman who must defy her deep-rooted passivity to take command of her life.Margaret’s and Andrew’s dual stories weave through many important historical events: the San Francisco Earthquake, World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarianism in Germany, Pearl Harbor, and the internment of Japanese American citizens. Early during my reading I considered not finishing the novel. “The pace is slow,” I complained to my wife. A fourth of her way through the book, while I was writing the first draft of this review, she disagreed. “It’s not slow at all.” I persevered and was amply rewarded. This is a thought-provoking book. In strategic places Jane Smiley’s excellent command of language stirred powerfully my emotions. I conclude this review with this example, the death of Margaret’s jaundiced baby."Alarm and guilt surged in her, burning upward from her feet, enveloping her head, her brain, her mind in a fever of knowledge. … Alexander started to make a noise, high-pitched and distressed, and to arch his back. It seemed to her that he was crying for help, so she picked him up and went to the door of the room and opened it. Naoko was in the hallway. She looked at her, and without Margaret’s saying a thing, the girl ran out the front door. Margaret closed her door and carried Alexander over to the bed. She sat down and readied herself to nurse, but in that short moment, the moment between her sitting down and her putting him to the breast, he lost even that ability—Margaret felt it. It was a feeling of something dissolving. She looked at his face. She saw that he had but one thing left, which was that he could look back at her. She stroked the top of his head, moving the thin hairs this way and that, feeling the smoothness of his golden skin. She held him closer, as gently as she could. And then, in the way that you can feel with your baby but not see or sense with anyone else larger or more distantly related, she felt the life force go out of him entirely."

This book reminded me a little of the play A Doll's House by Ibsen. The difference is that the protagonist is from with the exception of place and time. Horrors of living through two wars and how these affect friends and relatives are explored. Reader was good.

The author was smart to give you some of the ending of the story at the beginning of the book (hint for all those who sin by reading the last pages or chapter first: the author makes you do so here, so don't bother). The story then goes back (40-50? years) and starts at the "beginning." The names and objects mentioned in the prologue are the only things really that helped pull me through the book. As the items are encountered you almost check them off. Otherwise there is little overt conflict to propel the story. It's simply the account of one woman's life, mostly regarding her dull marriage to a astronomer/physicist who sees conspiracy theories around him. Her character is very interesting, and there a good sense of the history of the time period (late 1800/early 1900), but it's nothing too exciting.

I have mixed feelings about Jane Smiley. Some books I love ([Moo], [A Thousand Acres]), and others don't work at all for me ([Greenlanders] and this one). Stretching from the late nineteenth century to the 1940's it tells the story of Margaret and her husband Andrew, a scientist who does not get the recognition that he thinks he deserves. Set against a backdrop of the real events of the times it just did not work for me.

I really liked this story. Interesting main character and I think Ms. Smiley truly reflexed the age and culture. Sort of sad of course but perhaps there is an underlying sadness to life. Perhaps that my mood today

I have read a few Jane Smiley books over the years, because I know that other people like her, but I just don't get her. Her characters always seems so static and the plots ho-hum. I'm probably not being fair to her, as I don't read much fiction.

I think that Jane Smiley has a true gift in her ability to take a commonly understood concept and weave it into a meaningful story. "Private Life" concerns itself with the private life of a married couple, the private side that no one can see from the outside looking in. It isn't necessarily a pretty picture, but it is very real for many people. What do couples accept about one another, what do they regret, what makes them furious, and most importantly, what makes them stay? These are some of the issues addressed in this story of a brilliant/crazy man and his wife whose mothers were relieved to "finally" marry her off at the spinsterly age of 27, around 1900. The couple weathers two world wars and their own relationship.....tough to call on which is more difficult! This is the best Smiley novel I have read since "A Thousand Acres".

Smiley's Private Life puzzles me. She writes so very well, and the notion of this particular character and her marriage interest me. But, here comes the but -- it's bloodless. Certainly Smiley wants nothing to do with melodrama, but I for one would like a more emotional involvement with a novel. I felt I was watching the characters as if they were shadows on the wall. It's obviously not a book for me.

I was looking forward to this book as I enjoyed Moo. This story is very boring and the main characters, Margaret and Andrew, are lifeless and dull. Everytime the reader thinks there is going to be something happening the possibilty sinks into oblivion. There are several secondary characters that are interesting but they do seem to fade into the background.

This is one of those "too much but not enough" books. Too much scientific theory from the viewpoint of a scientist that wasn't the genius he thought he was and not enough elucidation to make me feel empathy for the cardboard characters of Margaret and Andrew and their lifeless marriage. Granted, there were illuminating episodes about the San Francisco earthquake and the quiet friendship with a Japanese family. The birth of Alexander was exquisite and emotional. Furthermore, it was interesting to review to history of the times between 1880 and 1942 when the story took place.However, these few bright spots were overshadowed by the passivity of Margaret and the increasing boorish and obsessive behavior of her strange husband, the proverbial mad scientist. This is one of those books that I'll remember, but probably for the wrong reasons.

I did not like this book, and I don't understand why Smiley is so popular. I found the characters impossible to care about, and I don't even know why I read the whole thing. I suppose I kept expecting something that would make up for the tedium beforehand, but that never happened. (I hated "A Thousand Acres" too, so I guess I'm done with Jane Smiley.)

16 Dec 2010 - BCBirmingham Not So Secret Santa from KateThe story of one woman's life and marriage from the 1880s through to the early 1940s. It can be seen as a strongly feminist work, highlighting the lack of opportunities for self-fulfilment for somen of this time, and it also highlights the plight of Japanese Americans in WWII. It was also really depressing, though, and I couldn't see what genre it belonged to, although there have been various portraits of women in the 20th century and of marriage recently (Andrew Sean Greer, Anne Tyler...). I'm glad I've read it, as I've read all of hers, but not my favourite of her oeuvre. Looking at reviews on LibraryThing and Amazon, most other readers seem to agree with me, which is something of a relief. Oh, and it's got elements of her own family, describing some situations of a great-aunt and uncle, which is probably where the "different genre every time" bit comes into play.

I liked this book but somewhat less than the critics. Slow moving but ultimately safisfying chronicle of one woman's life from the end of the US Civil War until the outbreak of World War II.

This is quiet book for Jane Smiley. It made me very glad to live in this time. Margaret is an intelligent woman yet the options available to most women at the beginning of the 20th century were not many, barring having extraordinary drive. Smiley tells her story - she doesn't embellish it with lots of drama or self-pity - she allows the reader to feel the life Margaret led. It was thought provoking and honest.

I'd forgotten my previous judgment that I really haven't enjoyed Smiley's books all that much after The Greenlanders, which is one of my favorite books of all time, and A Thousand Acres - and so I kept slogging along through Private Life hoping it would get better, hoping something would happen, but it never did. Disappointing.

Private Life rivals A Thousand Acres in excellence. Using a marriage over the course of the 1st half of the 20th century Jane Smiley manages to discuss the confusion and difficulty a reasonable and reasonably accommodating person has in a relationship with a delusional, and overpoweringly self confident, self consumed partner, whether that partner is her large, scientist husband or a large, tyrannical government. The metaphors are perfect, references to coincidental people and places twist around to meet themselves in larger and dangerous circumstances, and always there are little details (she forgot the forks at a picnic, the baby coot makes little ripples in the water) to make each scene describe both itself and the larger themes.

Moving from the late-nineteenth century through World War II, and crossing North America from Missouri to California, this novel is the story of the unhappy and increasingly distant marriage of Margaret and Andrew Early. Always an unlikely couple, the Earlys' marriage grows more troubled over time. By her late twenties Margaret was in danger of living her life as a perpetual spinster. Andrew, a troubled and headstrong scientist, dismissed in shame from his faculty position in Chicago, charms Margaret into accepting an offer of marriage when her options are few. Yet Andrew's problems loom over the marriage: mentally ill, obsessive, a conspiracy theorist, the marriage becomes a cage that holds Margaret in increasing unhappiness. This book is stark and raw. Breaking out of unhappy marriages is such a mainstay of contemporary fiction, Smiley's work serves as a useful reminder about the realities that have and do face so many women. Reality was and is frequently far more in line with Margaret's experience: decades of unhappiness, few options, with escape beyond the bounds of thought or possibility. Margaret's marriage seems to close in over time. As her existing friends and family die or move away, Andrew's increasing psychosis cuts her off from social circles. Margaret's private life becomes an increasingly tight enclosure. Margaret's is a life that belies easy solutions. Above all, this is a book about making do with what has been given, and its remarkable just how good a book about making do can be.

I have found this book incredibly difficult to get into. I may try again sometime in the future but for now, it's one of those that will languish, unread, on my bookcase.

Jane Smiley's writing is always clean and spare, and yet somehow rich and deep. This book, while probably not her best work, is no exception, and the story it tells is engaging and thought-provoking. It's my understanding that she has a personal connection with at least some of the primary characters, although it is a work of fiction, and I wonder if that kept her a little too close to the characters to subject them to the same crystalline examination she usually applies. I've given it only three stars because she has set the bar so high for herself. It's a great read.

Beautiful subtle writing, but the story was unrelenting in its unhappiness.

This historical novel set between 1883 and 1942 is a story of an unhappy marriage. It is a slow paced novel of thoughts and feelings, with significant historical events forming the backdrop for Margaret’s private life, but I thought it was beautifully written and thoughtful. Margaret’s widowed mother is keen to see her three daughters marry well, and relieved when Margaret, the oldest, finally marries at the old age of 27, to Captain Early, a naval officer and scientific genius. She looks forward to having children, but a miscarriage is followed by a sickly baby who only lives for a few weeks. Meanwhile, she learns how her marriage was engineered by her husband’s mother and her own. Andrew is an eccentric with a talent for alienating people – the man once regarded as a scientific genius in their Missouri hometown turns out to be just a mad scientist and not a very good one.There are many things to like about this novel despite the atmosphere of boredom and frustration, as Margaret is trapped in a stultifying marriage. I enjoyed the California setting as the couple move to Vallejo near San Francisco and the dry wit with which Smiley highlights the contradictions of Margaret’s life. Margaret is a warm, caring person and she makes friends outside the home, including the single career woman Dora and the Japanese Kimura family. I liked the way Margaret retained and developed the ability to think for herself and question her husband’s prejudices. I was very moved by the account of the birth and short life of Margaret’s son and her difficulties breastfeeding him. I loved the detailed portrayal of social attitudes, including those in Margaret’s family. There is lots to think about in the novel – when Margaret was 8, the deaths of two of her brothers, one in an accident, one from illness, were followed by her father’s suicide. Yet her mother’s response to this tragedy is actually one of being liberated – she has been ill with grief for months, now she is free to move the family back to her father’s house and bring them up to marry. Another little comment by Smiley is to have Margaret reading aloud the work of Kate Chopin, since rediscovered by generations of 20th century feminists, to her mother and sisters. Readers looking for an action packed plot and a fast pace will be disappointed by this book, but I am really pleased to have had the chance to read it and would recommend it to those who like books in which not much seems to happen.

Private Life uses domestic details to sketch an unfamiliar picture of a broad sweep of world history, from the turn of the century through two world wars. It's a portrait of an entirely average individual, a slow moving inevitable tragedy, big history from an intimate perspective which makes the familiar skeleton of major events unfamiliar and fascinating. The resulting novel is evocative and slowly drew me in, mirroring how enmeshed Margaret and Andrew become. The main body of the text is an enviably elegant example of how to move through time and space, building a broad cast of nuanced characters without info-dumps, and letting the underlying patterns gradually reveal themselves almost effortlessly. However, I almost didn't make it to the main text, thanks to the dreaded Prologue. I can sort of see why the decision to bookend the story was made- the sixty years of history illuminate the meaning of the 1943 events, and give a very satisfying weight to the book's conclusion, but the decision to replicate a wartime shortage of speech-marks in those two sections - and only those two sections? Completely distanced me from Margaret right at the critical moment.

Smiley's latest book is a historical novel following one woman's life from her childhood in Missouri after the Civil War to married life in San Francisco, with the action inexorably moving towards the Second World War.Margaret is a character notable for her ordinariness and apparent passivity; she says of herself 'I was the third sister even though I'm the oldest. There's always a beautiful sister and a smart sister, and then there's a sister that's not beautiful or smart'. Her life is occupied with soothing and reining in her egotistical husband, an astronomer obsessed with disproving Einstein's theory of relativity. When she overhears her acquaintances describing her as a 'saint' she is deeply wounded, realizing how they must pity her situation.I found this book enjoyable and the time period it covered was interesting. However, there did seem to be something rather flat and unadventurous about its narrative (despite well-drawn minor characters and flashes of sharpness and irony from both Margaret and the third person narrative). The last third of the book, however, became progressively darker and more nightmarish and one realises how Smiley has been building up layer after layer of domestic detail until the reader realises that they are just as much trapped in the marriage as Margaret is.The ending is very well done, leaving one with a feeling of both resolution and revelation.

I found this book had engaging elements to it with the historical backdrop of American life from the late 19th Century through until just after WWII but I struggled with the characterisation ... not because it isn't well done but because it was hard to identify and sympathise with the lead characters.Margaret is the '3rd daughter', despite being the oldest[not the pretty one or the intelligent one] and she struggles to find direction in her life until local scientist and adventurer Captain Andrew Early proposes. Margaret and Andrew's marriage seen through her eyes appears claustrophobic, frustrating and unfulfilling; Andrew's life revolves around his scientific research and his desire to make his name in the world of astronomy.There is much to interest the reader but I found my attention wandering as I waited to find out what the link was to the first chapter - the first chapter is set in 1947 and then we move back to the 1880's - and I felt we never fully got to grips with Pete, Dora and the Kimura family. I wanted to know more about their lives but all we get is brief glimpses as they come into contact with Margaret and Andrew.I am glad I was given the chance to read this, it is a well written account of a difficult marriage with the extra dimension of intrigue/drama around the naval base and the scientific dimension, but ultimately not a book I really loved and will head back to.

Nobody ever said that marriage is easy. "Private Life" is Jane Smiley's rather dry take on marriage as seen through the eyes of the women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is filled with husbands that are, at best, benevolent dictators and, at worst, contemptible egomaniacs that see their wives as little more than housekeepers to be slept with on occasion. There are very few happy women in "Private Life" and, with the possible exception of Mrs. Kimura (a Japanese immigrant to America), none of them are married. For these women, marriage is a crapshoot and, by the time they figure out if they have won or loss, it is too late to ask for a second roll of the dice. It is telling that two of the most accomplished women in the novel, and probably its happiest overall, are women who choose not to marry: the Kimura daughter, who works with her midwife mother, and Dora, a successful newspaper correspondent and friend of the book's main character, Margaret Mayfield. The other women eventually, sooner for some than for others, come to see their marriages as more burden than blessing. "Private Life" opens in 1942, just as Margaret Mayfield locates what is left of a Japanese family she has grown close to during her years in coastal California. The Kimuras are living in a horse stall at the closed-down racetrack where they, along with hundreds of others of Japanese descent, have been interned on the orders of the federal government. What particularly hurts Margret is the role played in their arrest by her husband, the self-declared-genius, astronomer, and unofficial physicist, Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. By 1942, Margaret knows that her husband is more fool than genius and she regrets the lifetime she has squandered in his company. Smiley tells Margaret's story in a series of flashbacks of five-to-ten-year intervals, beginning with her childhood in rural Missouri where she grew up with her two sisters and two brothers. Life was cheap in nineteenth century Missouri; women died during childbirth, men in war, and both sexes frequently succumbed to illness and accident. The Mayfield family is often visited by tragedy and, at age 27 already dangerously close to spinsterhood, Margaret will marry more out of desperation than of love. If only she had known what was to come of her marriage to Captain Andrew Early. Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early is a man with a high opinion of himself, one who never considers the possibility that he might be wrong on any scientific question or issue of the day. He makes a good initial impression on those he seeks to impress but cannot control his emotions or tongue if challenged. Finally, having burned one bridge after another behind him, he brings Margaret to the observatory at Mare Island's U.S. Navy base and shipyard where he will work for the next several decades. It is on Mare Island and in Vallejo, California, that Margaret will proceed to waste the rest of her life alongside the man she comes to realize is insane. This is not an easy book to read, despite its interesting theme and look at early twentieth century California history (including the San Francisco earthquake of 1906), because of the degree to which it gets bogged down in the details of Andrew Early's misguided scientific theories. Those who make it through those pages, however, might feel it was worth their effort in the end. Yes, nobody said that marriage would be easy. According to Jane Smiley, it might just be impossible. Rated at: 3.0