The world that Sue Miller creates in Lost in the Forest is a rich one, full of detail. Reading this novel, you can nearly see the slant of light over Napa Valley’s vineyards, the sidewalks and shop windows of a town that’s newly a tourist attraction. As family dramas unfold, Miller almost always perfectly captures the cadence of conversation, shouting and silence, what is said and what is not. Which isn’t to say this book is a domestic piece, exactly: the plot centers on one family learning to move through divorce and grief and love, and the small circle of friends and neighbors who surround them, but the characters are intelligent and interesting, engaged in their own private lives and engaged in the world of ideas, of books. Eva, mother of three, divorced, remarried, and recently widowed, owns a bookshop; most of the others are avid readers, as well, interested in fiction and folklore and plays, in poetry and words with Latin roots, in how stories are shaped. Lost in the Forest plays with convention, with expectation: Daisy, age fifteen, has an affair with an older man, but this book isn’t Lolita, and the story ends with her words, not his. Miller doesn’t moralize; she lets her characters speak. Lost in the Forest shifts between perspectives, moving elegantly in and out of characters’ thoughts, and the result is a complex and layered novel, lovely to read and difficult to put down.
(I actually finished this book a few weeks ago—I had an advance copy—but I didn’t want to write anything about it until it was actually out in stores.)
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