OF A GOLDEN AGE

I’ll take “Things that hit close to home” for $500:

A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students.

Rebecca Miller’s novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, conspiratorily rushed into a feature film a year after its publication, does my favorite thing: It creates and loves on a strong, intelligent woman protagonist. It also delves into the mind of her twentysomething daughter who is equally strong and intelligent with reactionary traits from her experiences as Pippa’s daughter.

Pippa is middle aged, married to a thirty-years-older man who has moved them into a “retirement village” where Pippa instantly becomes the youngest person she knows and feels surprisingly burdened by her newfound freedom and limited possessions. She looks at her husband and sees his newfound frailty and is reminded of the difference in their ages, I guess, although it is never illustrated why she feels this way or what her feelings really are.

He alludes to the way he rescued her from her earlier life, and in a framed middle section of the book we see the life he means — in which Pippa’s mother is a diet-pill addict with complex neediness issues and Pippa breaks free in an extreme way that almost alienates her as a relatable character. Paradoxically it gives her power, both personally and narratively, as she swirls through her life and lets a lot of things happen to her. Her one life-changing action excuses several years’ worth of passive nonresistance, and eventually, Pippa’s choice of a settled family life is a stark exercise of control over her own life.

I liked this book mostly because of Miller’s beautiful writing, which is thick with descriptive language but not choked by it. Her tone and choices completely suit Pippa’s mindframe as she experiences bored first-world problems in her new life as an unemployed housewife with children who’ve moved out. Nothing about Pippa’s life is familiar to me — especially not her reckless, horrifying life as a pre-matrimony twentysomething — but I still loved her and related to her dilemmas.

This book is kind of like the magazine Real Simple, which I also love, even though it has nothing to do with my life, even though the idea of curbing your busyness by buying hired help or expensive organizational furniture is alien to me. Because who isn’t pulled a little by the idea of a simple, elegant life full of single fresh flowers in spotless vases, of “easy” meals of shrimp or lamb chops alongside fresh asparagus? There is not glamor in a plate of spaghetti, unless, like Pippa, you put caught-daily Long Island clams on it.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

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