Book Reviews
The Lake Shore Limited is perhaps best appreciated as an extended character study. In places the prose drags, and there’s too much filler detail, as if Miller weren’t sure how to move the story forward without a proper plot. Still, the novel is worth reading for the ruthlessness of its revelations. .
Ligaya Mishan - New York Times
Miller's exquisite new novel, The Lake Shore Limited, is so sophisticated and thoughtful that it should either help redeem the term "women's literature" or free her from it once and for all. Several times in these pages someone refers to the relentless psychological analysis found in Henry James's novels.... In fact, The Lake Shore Limited may be the closest thing we'll get to a James response to 9/11: no drama, no crisis, barely any action at all—just a deeply affecting examination of the thoughts and feelings of four people still moving in the shadow of that tragedy.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Four people are bound together by the 9/11 death of a man in Miller's insightful latest. Leslie, older sister and stand-in mother to the late Gus, clings to the notion that Gus had found true love with his girlfriend, Billy, before he was killed. But the truth is more complicated: Billy, a playwright, has written a new play that explores the agonizing hours when a family gathers, not knowing the fate of their mother and wife who was aboard a train that has been bombed. The ambivalent reaction of the woman's husband has shades of Billy and Gus's relationship, particularly the limbo she's been in since he died. Rafe, the actor playing the ambivalent husband, processes his own grief and guilt about his terminally ill wife as he steps more and more into his character. Finally, there's Sam, an old friend Leslie now hopes to set up with Billy. While the plot doesn't have the suspense and zip of The Senator's Wife, Miller's take on post-9/11 America is fascinating and perfectly balanced with her writerly meditations on the destructiveness of trauma and loss, and the creation and experience of art.
Publishers Weekly
An ambitious exploration of the interaction between choice and random chance in human relationships, from Miller (The Senator's Wife, 2008, etc.). The book centers on four characters' reactions to the play that one of them has scripted about the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Leslie attends the play of the title with her doctor husband and their architect friend Sam, with whom she once shared vague romantic longings. Playwright Billy was Leslie's younger brother's live-in girlfriend when he died six years earlier on one of the 9/11 planes. Still grieving for Gus, Leslie assumes Billy feels the same sense of loss and is disturbed by Billy's play, which describes the ambivalence of the survivor. The play's hero is a man who learns that a bomb has gone off on the train on which his wife was traveling. Horrified to feel relief that his wife's death would free him to marry his lover, he sends the lover away, and the play ends with his ambiguous greeting to his wife when she returns. As Leslie struggles to understand what the play means about Billy and Gus's relationship, the actor Rafe, who is playing the lead, also finds the play hitting close to home. His wife is dying of ALS, and he is committed to her care. After he sleeps with Billy one night, he brings the loss and guilt he feels about his wife to his performance, the brilliance of which resuscitates his flagging career. Billy has written the play to clear the air. She had decided to leave Gus before he died, but Leslie sucked her into the role of grieving lover. Now Leslie throws Billy together with Sam. He is immediately smitten, but Billy resists. An architect whose first wife died of breast cancer and whose second marriage ended in divorce, Sam allows chance to take its course. Miller raises tantalizing questions about the ethics of love, but the actual drama involving her decent, troubled characters never rises above a simmer.