PRIVATE LIFE by Jane Smiley, 2010.

After having my interest in it piqued by several reviews, I picked this up as I walked past the new book shelf in my library one day to read. I remember enjoying A Thousand Acres very much as a rich and satisfying story based on King Lear. The basic story in this novel concerns a young woman, Margaret Mayfield, born and bred in post-Civil War Missouri, who is taught in all ways by her mother Lavinia to be a good wife, and is at 27 an old maid with no real prospects for a husband. Into her life comes Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, an astronomer who needs a wife. At the urging and manipulation of their mothers, the two marry, move to California, where he is posted to a San Francisco-area island to be in charge of the navy's observatory, and Margaret sets about making a life for them. His devotion to the study of science takes over his life, leaving little room for Margaret, who slowly realizes that everything is about Andrew and his professional and private needs and she must support him in every way by cooking and cleaning and typing his manuscripts, etc. Their lives change somewhat as they suffer the loss of a child, as they age, as they contend with new ideas and things like automobiles, and deal with important national issues and crises--the San Francisco earthquake, World War I, Pearl Harbor, the Japanese-American internments, and find their loyalties are tested. Margaret, so hopeful of having a fulfilling life as a wife and mother, eventually has to accept that her life is not what she would have wanted for herself. This story just somehow never quite involved me very much--lots of appropriate details and impressions of life during the period of post-Civil War to World War II, several interesting and likable characters, like Mrs. Lear and her sons, the Kimura family, and so on, but the two main characters just seemed rather one note: Andrew is hugely egotistical and often unpleasant; Margaret is at times almost disturbingly placid and accepting of everything. If Smiley's point was to show how a marriage can start out so promising and then over time descend into a sort of nothingness and emptiness, then she succeeded, as I felt very little for either Margaret or Andrew by the book's end. I have no complaint about Smiley's writing, as she's very readable; I guess it just wasn't a very enjoyable story for me and in the end not very satisfying.