The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Review)

Released September 2008 (HarperCollins) * 239 pages * ISBN 10: 1554682533

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller is about Pippa Lee, a woman in her fifties married to a man in his 80s. The couples moves to a retirement village and Pippa starts to come unglued: sleepwalking, sleepdriving, sleepsmoking, etc. The book moves to an exploration of her past and then back to the present. The marketing copy says that Miller is an acclaimed author, but I don’t see it in this book.

I found it difficult to care about any of the characters. Pippa herself didn’t seem real or have much depth even though she was given an interesting past. I didn’t feel Pippa’s struggle, and I didn’t believe the sleepwalking/breakdown plot device, which is never explained properly and rests on weak ground as far as suspension of disbelief goes.

What put me off the book most was the style of writing. When Miller writes in the third person, she tells what the characters are like, what they are feeling, and how they are perceived by others. I felt like I was watching a director giving instruction to actors about how they should act and feel.

Miller also overreaches when she tries to use similes. Instead of flowing with the writing, the similes took me right out of the story while I tried to wrap my mind around the imagery (this is not a good thing). I would have found the book much more readable if the similes were deleted, which would also have saved Miller from winning this year’s Purple Prose Award. Here are some examples of her similes:

“…the impulse had rung out faintly within her for years, like the occasional beep of a cell phone lost deep in an apartment.”

“The two swollen halves of her upper lip drooped suggestively, like a set of red velvet curtains tied at the corners of her mouth.”

“…wondering if she could possibly be pregnant in spite of the vestigial coil still lodged in her uterus like astronaut litter abandoned on the moon.”

It’s a shame, because once I got to the part of the book about Pippa’s past, I could see glimpses of the acclaimed writer Miller is supposed to be. That section is written in first person and the use of similes drops tremendously—I’m not sure which change improves the story more.