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beatitude's review
3.0
This is Isabel Miller's last book, and also her least popular. I can see why. The main character, Lucille, is a difficult person to like, and so is the titular character, Laurel. But the book isn't really about either of them. It's about the many kinds of relationships two women can have with one another, and the huge unbridgeable gap that lies between any two people trying to understand and love one another. As people we somehow have to figure out a way to negotiate this gap with language, kindness, the body, laughter, cruelty, manipulation, and every other tool at our disposal. Like the characters do with each other in the book, the reader has to work to understand and love them. In amidst all the conflict are the simple moments of domestic happiness that Miller is so good at describing - she really is the spiritual successor to Jane Austen.
This is a raw and sometimes painful novel, but it's also highly stylised in that peculiar direct way Miller has. The characters talk to one another in a kind of poetic shorthand, and it's more evident here than in any of her other books. At first I read it with less enjoyment than The Love of Good Women or Side by Side, but the characters' struggles and Miller's startling, elegant, perfect prose crept up on me. By the end I was completely won over. I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first introduction to Miller, but if you enjoy her work it's worth reading this book, especially for the glorious last line. No one knows quite how to end a book as beautifully as Isabel Miller.
This is a raw and sometimes painful novel, but it's also highly stylised in that peculiar direct way Miller has. The characters talk to one another in a kind of poetic shorthand, and it's more evident here than in any of her other books. At first I read it with less enjoyment than The Love of Good Women or Side by Side, but the characters' struggles and Miller's startling, elegant, perfect prose crept up on me. By the end I was completely won over. I wouldn't recommend this as someone's first introduction to Miller, but if you enjoy her work it's worth reading this book, especially for the glorious last line. No one knows quite how to end a book as beautifully as Isabel Miller.
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