A cartographer of marital love

Author examines fidelity over course of a long marriage

Monogamy Sue Miller Harper

In her 1950s work The Unmade Bed, photographer Imogen Cunningham depicts sexual intimacy. No people appear in the image, but the rumpled folds in the sheets and discarded hair combs suggest previous bedmates.

In Sue Miller's Monogamy, Annie — half of the couple at the novel's centre — presses to include a similar image in an upcoming exhibit of her art photographs. She thinks of her photo of tangled sheets and books scattered on the floor as “an evocation of the intimate, sexual heart of a marriage.

She had wanted it to be the first thing people saw at the show.” But the exhibit's organizer dismisses it as a cliché. Sexual intimacy may be the beating heart of a long-term marriage, but perhaps it is not the lifeblood that sustains it.

Miller's novel — one of many in a distinguished career — depicts the warp of a stable 30-year marriage and the patterns created by the weft of issues of trust and fidelity. Miller interrogates the notion that sexual exclusivity is the only measure of faithfulness while deftly exploring whether the bond of a long marriage is fundamentally changed when one or both partners find intimacy elsewhere.

In the early narrative, chapters alternate points of view between Annie and her bookstore-owner husband, Graham. Both had earlier marriages that ended in divorce. Annie's first marriage provokes feelings of shame after she falls out of love with a man whose cutting remarks toward others had shored her up against her young adult insecurities — at least until he turns his scorn on her. She leaves the marriage doubting her ability for genuine love. Graham's first marriage to Frieda had been ostensibly “open,” but Frieda had tired of the experiment almost immediately. Graham had carried on, oblivious to his wife's pain.

Graham pursues Annie with his joyous version of love, and she marries him, becoming stepmother to Graham's son, Lucas, and giving birth to their daughter, Sarah.

Graham dies within the first few chapters, and Miller chronicles the twin griefs of Annie's devastating loss and her discovery that Graham had had a brief affair. Annie's secondary grief over this newly exposed secret amplifies her anger but numbs her against feeling the finality of Graham's death.

Miller's narration expands so we see this marriage through the eyes of Sarah and Lucas, now adults, as well as Frieda, who provides the story of her marriage to Graham, and Graham's best friend, who knows why he had an affair.

The shifting perspectives in the narrative feel as if Miller is changing camera angles to demonstrate how dependent truth is on what is shown to us. Her skillfulness at doing so makes a familiar plot into an original story that reflects the real-life complexity of long relationships.