Monogamy, by Sue Miller

Looking back through past reviews, I can see that I have raved about Sue Miller’s writing in past novels of hers (The Lake Shore Limited, The Senator’s Wife, Lost in the Forest) and everything I said there about the beauty of her writing and her deftness with observing small details of human behavior and relationships, also applies to Monogamy.

Monogamy is the story of a long-lasting marriage that ends suddenly with the death of Annie’s husband Graham. As the days and weeks following Graham’s death unroll, Annie’s initial simple grief over her loss becomes more complicated as she learns things about Graham she didn’t know — including an affair that is not safely hidden in the distant past of their relationship, but that continued right up to his death. Suddenly, everything she thinks she knows about their life together has to be reexamined. The novel is really just a detailed study of one woman’s journey through grief and her attempt to reconcile what she learns about her late husband with the marriage she thought she had, and it’s beautifully done.