Sex, drugs and loss: many layers of a life
Aine O'Connor applauds a novel that shows how our lives are built up of layers whereby a passive public image conceals disquieting truths
Sunday March 30 2008
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Rebecca Miller
Canongate, €15
FOR more than half of her life Pippa Lee has been a devoted wife to Herb, who, upon the onset of ill-health and his 80th birthday, suggests they move to a retirement community.
Long the perfect accompaniment to Herb's achievements, Pippa is attractive, kind, admired and provider of excellent children, meals and entertainment.
While she enjoys the liberation brought on by downsizing and shedding baggage, Pippa finds it also creates a gap that tips the carefully crafted balance of her life. At 50, she is years younger than most of her new neighbours, yet like them in a place that no matter how jaunty cannot hide its subtext of Last Stop Before Death. Many years before, she had buried her doubts and thrown herself into becoming the perfect wife and mother, not Stepford, but a supporting character in the lives of her husband and children as opposed to the star of her own.
Now, with more time, fewer responsibilities and a permanent reminder of finality, Pippa's acceptance wobbles and a long -buried part of her starts to manifest.
The part of Pippa that allowed her to mould to her role, also allows her to surf the change, she is bewildered but not thrown, questioning but not undermined, although she does wonder if she might be having a quiet little nervous breakdown. Pippa's success has long been, and will continue to be, her ability to allow events to happen.
A film version is already well underway with Miller scheduled to direct a star-studded cast that includes Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, Robyn Wright Penn and Keanu Reeves. The blurb for the film reveals a plot fact I almost considered a twist in the book. It's a shift of emphasis perhaps deemed vital in film-making, but one that goes unmentioned in the blurb for the book, and indeed it is a mark of the novel's strength that it remains so readable without any hint of twist or upcoming surprise.
There are stories where a twist or secret is so hinted at that the reader becomes impatient and the twist becomes a shadow.
However Pippa is a likable, clever, knowing character with whom I was quite happy to travel knowing that the story was leading somewhere, without any panic to find out exactly where.
The story of Pippa's new life intertwines with the history that got her there, the weres and could-have-beens that she chose to reject when she chose her life with Herb. People, addictions, behaviours, events that Pippa elected to leave behind or eradicate from her conscience when she picked what she deemed the best option. The secret lives of Pippa Lee, which prove that what on the surface seems like a rather passive life, required great strength and effort of will.
As the title suggests, this is a novel about the many layers of a life. And while Pippa's is wealthier and more glamorous than the average housewife's, the moral is the same, you never know how, or what it takes, for anyone to fulfil their public role.
Pippa the role is written in third person via a narrator, while the real Pippa is written in first person (although as events unfold this technique forces the reader to consider where the line between real and assumed personalities lies). Miller's prose is always sharp and visual without being overly descriptive. All of the descriptions, whether of people, places or emotions manage to be both prosaic and evocative.
Indeed, everything is treated prosaically -- sex, drugs, fidelity, infidelity, loss -- everything is treated as a simple fact, there and to be dealt with, for this is how Pippa is. We also learn why she is like that.
In many respects, this is a novel about choice, how we can choose to live and how we can choose to interpret the things that happen to us, whether we see hindrance or opportunity, setback or crisis, failure or success. It's also about the continuing nature of life, that it really isn't over til the fat lady sings.
Although it had come to a natural and perfectly timed conclusion, I could happily have read much more about Pippa Lee and her secret lives.
- Aine O'Connor
