A ‘happily married’ woman whose life starts unravelling… a well-worn, yet invariably seductive theme for novel. What reader doesn’t want to be unravelled and restrung, if not in life at least though fiction. I was expecting a little of the quirky humour of Anne Tyler, and a touch of Lorrie Moore’s edgy teens, and all of the obvious wit and intelligence of Rebecca Miller - film-maker (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose), short-story writer (Personal Velocity), and having seen her in public interview for Personal Velocity, I was anticipating razor-sharp writing to match her incisive, studied and self-assured way of articulating the lives of women. So off we go, no pressure Rebecca

Having lived a bohemian life to the full, Pippa Lee finds herself in her early 50s with her husband Herb, 30 years her senior, settling into a retirement community called ‘Marigold Village’. As the stifling dullness of ‘wrinkle village’ and its inhabitants start to suffocate Pippa (and the readers) we skip to flashback mode and learn of Pippa’s more colourful life to this point. Pippa causes scandal at 16 by initiating and exploring sex with a somewhat tragic, downtrodden, balding teacher named Mr. Brown (who wouldn’t be out of place in Roger Hargreaves series, if there was a Mr. Unhappily Married) and as result breaks free from her clawing, cloying, pill-popping mother Suky, her hapless Minister father, and four, somewhat anonymous, boisterous brothers and into the arms of sensible aunt Trish, who introduces heself as a fellow ‘black sheep’.

Before we’ve chance to draw breath, Trish’s lover Kat has embroiled the teen into a hardcore S+M photo-shoot for her ‘novel’… (I may be mellowing, or becoming complacent, as I think in the past I would have been outraged by the permanent weals on Pippa’s back from her encounter with lesbians- hmmm so lesbians are predatory, cliched, and heartless… or weak, homely types like the aunt? I’m letting Miller off-the-hook here, only because I reckon maybe, just maybe, there are enough three dimensional portrayals of lesbian lives out there! )

Back to Pippa’s lives - and I’m not going to introduce any more spoilers, suffice to say I found the fucked-up teen a lot more palatable than the docile wife and yet wanted to return to the latter, to look for signs of life underneath the talk of what she is preparing for her husband’s dinner. At times the novel tread an uneasy line for me, between presenting and subverting cliche. I decided this was brave of Miller, not lazy. She’s a natural, often playful, storyteller, perhaps more at home as a writer-director, letting her gift for casting and eliciting intimate performances bring a complexity to her characters that is sometimes lacking on the page. (There is a film in production, unsurprisingly, with some of Hollywood’s finest including Robin Wright Penn as Pippa, Alan Arkin as Herb, Julianne Moore as Kat ) As character AND narrative builder, I found that Miller sometimes allows one eclipse the other. She introduces Pippa as a ‘cypher’.. yet the rest, the arty bohemian backdrop, was the vacuum for me, so for example the reflections on publishing and American novels (Herb is a publisher) seem a little overwrought.

Ultimately the novel seemed a commentary on wives and the ugly, unnecessary domestication of women. With the introduction of Pippa’s headstrong daughter Grace, we clock up four generations of mother-daughter turmoil, passionate and often cruel. I found I was matching and rejecting the degrees of feminism and refections on motherhood, like a familiar card game. Maybe if I’d read it at a time I felt stuck in my own life (many times!), it would have felt more profound and less of a game.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is Published by Cannongate, 2008

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