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Finished off Jane Smiley's Private Life this afternoon. I liked it a lot. I thought she did a good job of both developing the plot and the characters over a long period of time in the novel. I comment on this mostly because prior to reading this, I read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which seemed to get trapped in the inner thoughts of the main character too often, trying to be funny when it wasn't funny. I advise against reading A Gate at the Stairs; the main protagonist is a 20-year-old female college student, set in the timeframe when I was a 20-year-old female college student. I found the protagonist entirely too sophisticated for what someone that age would actually be like, especially given the character's upbringing and the setting of the novel.
However, I highly recommend Private Life. It's a fascinating portrait of two people and their marriage.
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If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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