...a breathtakingly moving look at a family and a community coming to terms with life and loss from the 1960s to today...Looking back decades after Miller’s Valley has disappeared to the dam’s waters, Mimi holds fast to the memories of the life she once longed to escape. Readers will find Miller’s Valley equally hard to forget.
Quindlen rocks the reader into a comfortable place with the steady ebb and flow of everyday events — but the more comfortable you get, the more you should pay attention to what’s afoot...Miller’s Valley, like many of Quindlen’s novels — with the exception of the soul-jarring Every Last One — isn’t full of drama. Rather, it’s a portrait of what it is to live and age, fueled by insight into the human condition.
Pace is a curious thing here, for though most of the book meanders like a wandering stream, the pace in its final pages picks up to an almost dizzying degree, complete with an unimaginable plot twist. Maybe this is a metaphor for the floodwaters finally rushing into the valley. I'd love to credit Quindlen with such a tactic. But the summing up feels more like it simply was time to close out the story, as though Mimi's middle age simply wasn't interesting enough to explore. Miller's Valley is a lovely read - the dialogue never disappoints - but in the end, it's more creek than reservoir.
The ending fast-forwards like a kind of majestic tide, carrying all these lives we’ve come to deeply care for into middle age and beyond, as people marry, birth children, move on and, yes, die. Family bonds are restructured, and secrets (one so startling, you never see it coming) are revealed that either wedge people apart or bind them together. But Quindlen also allows her characters mystery — and some of what’s unknown stays unknown, which burnishes her story with a kind of haunting grace and truthfulness. Here, in this novel, where so much is about what vanishes, there is also a deep beating heart, of what also stays.
By book's end, whether Miller's Valley becomes what one of Mimi's neighbors calls a 'drowned town' seems not as important as what happens to its inhabitants and how they remind us of ourselves. Quindlen's provocative novel will have you flipping through the pages of your own family history and memories even as you can't stop reading about the Millers.
The way the story jumps around and collapses time can be disconcerting. Mimi is narrating from old age, and just as the eventual flooding of the farmland jumbles everything in its wake, Mimi’s mind floods with scenes and moments in a way that makes sense to her but not always to us. For example, she spends a great deal of time talking about her high school love, Steven, but little time describing another man who will be very important to her. Fortunately, this doesn’t distract from the matriarchal theme at the heart of Miller’s Valley.
A good book, like a good movie, stays with you. When you think back on it, you can remember the emotions it evoked, the place where you sat while reading it and whether it left you in tears or feeling exhilarated or exhausted. Anna Quindlen’s Miller’s Valley does that, and transports you to a place that might be destined to disappear and a family certain to both reveal its secrets and allow some to go to the grave.
