Mourning the rituals of home life

Life seems so comfortable for the long-married Jo Becker, her many frustrations are only to be expected. In this slow-moving, retrospective and thoughtful novel, Sue Miller, through meticulous use of domestic detail, creates a very real sense of a woman's life.

Becker is a careful, unabashedly self-absorbed narrator. Well aware of the many lies she has told in her life, particularly as a young woman, she is driven by a need for clarity in everything. This is a goal which frequently eludes her.

Now in her 50s, Becker's life has become more than ever the story of her relationship with a loving, kind husband. Together they live with three dogs in an ordered home. Their lives are shaped by their respective jobs: he is a minister who cares deeply about his flock, she is a vet. But she is also the mother of three grown girls.

While her husband is content and has remained a loyal and loving companion, Becker has entered a state of mourning for the rituals of home life which are gone. The time of domestic chaos is passed; her daughters are adults she barely knows.

The dynamic of the novel comes from her need to confront and express the feelings which preoccupy her. "It's odd, I suppose, that when I think back over all that happened in that terrible time, one of my sharpest memories should be of some few moments the day before everything began."

It is the unresolved quality of her past which leads Becker to undermine her present with alarming and, for the reader, curiously uninvolving, abandon. Perhaps this comes from the lack of urgency in Miller's approach. Within the opening pages, Becker arrives at a realisation which epitomises the oddly detached tone of the entire novel.

"I was remembering the way it feels," she announces, "at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you're poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same."

When an anxious woman arrives at Becker's surgery with an ailing dog, two coincidental relationships draw the narrator towards a dangerous situation. The woman turns out to be her youngest daughter's professor. Also, the dog belongs to her husband, a man Becker knew in her youth. This discovery leads to a flashback which initially appears to be little more than an excuse to recreate the narrator's youth in the 1960s.

These sequences, however, far from confining themselves to indulgent lamentation about lost youth, evoke the darker aspects of Becker's personality.

As a young woman, she had quickly tired of her medical student first husband and what seemed, to her, a safely predictable future as a school teacher, and so became a waitress at a seedy bar. The novelty wears off for her, although her husband clearly gets a kick out of having a not quite respectable spouse.

Becker abandons her husband and moves into a quasi-commune household in which she attracts the obsessively caring attention of one of the commune members, Dana, a beautiful young woman who has so much love to give, it virtually results in her death.

While I Was Gone is a thorough though unsubtle book, devoid of humour. Its strength is the narrator's obvious regret for the loss of her daughters' respective childhoods and with them, the ending of her mothering role. This sadness overshadows her lament for her lost youth, although she is alert to lost opportunities.

Miller's real success, in what is an often ponderous account of self discovery, is in the sequences where she describes various domestic rituals, including preparing for Halloween - now, for her, an event for other people's children. Seldom in fiction has the presence of dogs in a household been so realistically and unsentimentally described.

Above all, in Jo Becker, she has created a convincingly human character, a secretive, selfish and needy personality, whose lack of heroism is effectively countered by her candid exploration of her various deceptions, and the bravery with which she acknowledges them.

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