With the war on, all sorts of characters crammed Vallejo these days. Had she not locked the front door? She stilled her breathing and listened. But, no, there hadn't been a telegram - she remembered that she'd looked for one.
She woke up a bit more and listened for the opening of the front door. Margaret sat up, but then she lay back on her pillow, dejected - she must have missed a telegram, and now her husband, Andrew, had returned. It was early fog still pressed against the two bedroom windows. Stella, who had been sleeping in her basket in the corner, leapt up barking and then slipped out the bedroom door. Her first bicycle ride is a revelation: "Riding a bicycle was living life at a much faster pace, and very stimulating."
Margaret reads Dickens, Horatio Alger and Kate Chopin, sews, takes long walks, and makes jams and cordials. In a lengthy middle section of the novel, in which the younger daughters grow up and marry, Smiley captures the unhurried rhythms of 19th-century America. There, Lavinia Mayfield trains her daughters to be wives and mothers. Her once sickly mother, now energized, moves Margaret and her two younger sisters back to her father's farm.
By the time she is 8, her two older brothers have died, and her distraught father has committed suicide.
Margaret Mayfield, the narrator, is the eldest daughter of a doctor in small-town Missouri. Smiley's epigram sets the stage: "In those days all stories ended with the wedding." This time of intellectual and technological ferment is the backdrop to Smiley's subtle and thorough portrait of the toxic nature of the institution of marriage. Jane Smiley's leisurely new novel Private Life covers nearly six decades, from 1883 to 1942, a historic period when technological innovations brought the country from a relatively slow-paced life to the dawn of the nuclear age.
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