Private Life Book

A stunning novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner that traverses the intimate landscape of one woman's life, from the 1880s to World War II.

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He's the most famous man their Missouri town has ever produced: a naval officer and an astronomer--a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret's mother calls the match "a piece of luck."

Yet Andrew confounds Margaret's expectations from the moment their train leaves for his naval base in San Francisco, and soon she realizes that his devotion to science leaves little room for anything, or anyone, else. She stands by him through tragedies both personal and those they share with the nation. But as World War II approaches, Andrew's obsessions take a darker turn, forcing Margaret to reconsider the life she's so carefully constructed.

A portrait of marriage and the mysteries that...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Not surprisingly, this is by no means the first time that thrice-divorced Smiley has focused on a troubled marriage or voiced doubts about the institution as a whole. In her beautifully nuanced early novellas, The Age of Grief, Ordinary Love, and Good Will -- still, along with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, my favorites among her books -- she explored the vagaries and complexity of marital love and family life. Although featuring contemporary settings, the novellas share with Private Life the theme that matrimony is essentially a private affair, unknowable from the outside (and often puzzling enough from the inside, as well). But Private Life makes the further case that how one conducts oneself in even this most intimate and private of relationships can have significant moral consequences in the public domain.