A Deceptive Woman and a Harrowing Jolt

Jo Becker, the narrator of Sue Miller’s sixth novel, is a veterinarian in a small Massachusetts town. Her husband, Daniel, is a minister. They have a happy marriage, three grown daughters, many friends, several pets. Jo’s voice is an easy one to identify with, scrupulous, intelligent yet full of feeling. We take it for granted that she’s a good person; that whatever harrowing thing is about to happen to her--and readers of Miller’s “The Good Mother” will expect something harrowing--it won’t be her fault.

This proves to be not quite true. Jo is everything we think she is, but she also has faults, in both the moral and the seismic senses of the word. She has broken in the past, more than once, along certain lines of stress: fleeing undemonstrative parents and a numb first marriage, seeking adventure. Even now, in middle age, she fantasizes, keeps secrets.

Jo’s youngest daughter, Sadie, a college student, announces that a favorite professor has moved to their town. The professor brings an ailing dog to Jo’s clinic and mentions that the name of her husband, a research scientist, is Eli Mayhew. “I knew someone with that name once,” Jo says--and, indeed, it’s the same person: one of her housemates in a commune in Cambridge where she lived for a few months in 1968.

The commune dissolved after Jo’s best friend there, Dana Jaworski, was murdered, supposedly by a burglar. Newspaper stories held the survivors up to scorn. “Everything we’d seen as making us innocent or good or open or pure--our sexual honesty, our willingness to stretch the limits of our minds chemically, our political activism--exactly these things . . . were now being described as tawdry, or disgusting, or criminal.”

Jo, who had been living under the alias of Felicia Stead, felt defeated; she had to go back to her previous identity, face up to the pain she had caused, leave her first husband formally, rebuild her life from scratch. She has done this successfully, it seems. Yet Eli’s reappearance puts a load on the old fissure. Memories of the commune seep back. “We have no right to let go of so much that shaped us,” she thinks. “We shouldn’t be allowed to forget.”

Another of Jo’s daughters, Cass, is a rock singer, traveling in a van and playing in dives. Jo has deplored this but comes to envy it after seeing Cass in ecstasy during a performance. Eli, once the nerdiest of the communards, now burly and confident, seems the key Jo can use to unlock the door that separates her from her past--and maybe the future. He pursues her, wants to talk. An affair appears likely.

At no point throughout all this--the novel’s first 200 pages--do we feel that Jo is anything but sympathetic. She has shown that she loves her children, her aged mother, the animals she cares for. Her relationship with Daniel, in particular, is warm, humorous, full of the ebb and flow of a real relationship realistically portrayed.

Yet such is the surprise Miller has in store--a surprise so neatly delivered that it hits Jo and us simultaneously--that we come to wonder whether she hasn’t been hopelessly flawed, dishonest, all her life. Jo concurs: “To Daniel, I was all of a piece,” she thinks, “full of a kind of odious integrity.”

The harrowing thing, then, is a crisis of mind and spirit, not the brute fact of murder. Miller is able to hang a whole novel on it because, like Jane Hamilton in “A Map of the World,” she is so good at rendering the everyday world into which crisis breaks. Details, nuances. Food and weather. The sweet reason of Daniel’s sermons, the primal howl of Cass’ singing. The hundred little jolts that set up the big one. If the grain of Miller’s prose isn’t quite as fine as Hamilton’s, or the width of her range quite as thrilling, in neither case is she far behind.