A review by dllh
Private Life by Jane Smiley

sad

3.25

I'm not sure what to say about it. The pacing sometimes felt slow, but it also covered 60+ years in a short 300 pages. The tail end was biting and made me think oddly of Shirley Jackson. It held my interest all the way through, but I wouldn't call it a page-turner. Yet I read it fairly quickly. It almost felt incomplete, or at least not long enough. But that's not quite right, because it was clearly framed by its opening and closing sections and Smiley doled out precisely what she wanted the reader to see. There's a sense of limitation or private-ness in the title itself.