Book Reviews
[A] riveting new novel...The narrative pacing is masterly, building tension even in its most psychologically subtle passages. The story is so well made and vividly imagined...The scenes are emotionally textured...But most impressive is the complex portrait of the protagonist.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times
From The Good Mother on, she has used her fiction to explore the artificially tamed emotional wilderness inhabited by husbands and wives...While I Was Gone continues this preoccupation... It swoops gracefully between the past and the present, between a woman's complex feelings about her husband and her equally complex fantasies — and fears — about another man...a beautiful and frightening book.
Jay Parini - The New York Times Book Review
This is gripping, close-to-the-bone fiction... It is the most acomplished novel in a career that began promisingly with The Good Mother and gained strength...For the narrator keeping part of herself secret has become central to her identity... While I Was Gone urges us to consider, very carefully, what's best told and what's best kept private.
Dan Cryer - Newsday
While I Was Gone, which is the author's best effort in years.... Miller is so adept at scratching through the surface of contemporary, well-educated, politically correct life to find the emotional turbulence and ambivalence buried not that deep inside.... But that, for better and worse, is the essence of the Miller style: She creates holier-than-thou characters and then sets out to deflate them in our—and their own—eyes. She ruminates and ruminates, draws scene after scene after scene to convince you her people are like this (slow, careful, and thoughtful) only to make them soon behave like that. No one is knowable, Miller seems to be saying: not one's friends, not one's children, not one's partner, not one's parents, and of course, not one's self.... These are the kinds of wise observations we need and read Sue Miller for, and in this, her sixth novel, the beloved author doesn't disappoint.
Sara Nelson (columnist for Glamour; contributor to Newsday, Chicago Tribune, and Salon; courtesy of Barnes & Noble.)