Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

When I first picked up The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, I was for whatever reason anticipating light-hearted, candy-coated chick lit.  Not the fairy tale-esq, almost insufferable sort found in Sophie Kinsella novels, but something more along the lines of Marian Keyes:  an engaging story about a thirty-something female with an interesting (but not too perfect) career and social life.  Instead, I found myself reading a serious literary novel about a woman, Pippa, who marries a successful editor and book publisher thirty years her senior in order to escape a life plagued by addiction and poverty.  When she is fifty and he eighty, Pippa and Herb (her husband) move into a retirement community, in which Pippa understandably feels rather out of place.  The story shifts about a third of the way through to a first person narrative in which Pippa tells of her troubled background, and then back to the novel's present for the final third.

I read this book rather quickly, as I found myself addicted to its eeriness.  Not eerie in the Stephen King way, but in the psychological way. There are certain troubling aspects of this novel (e.g. an exploration of mother-daughter relationships involving hints of latent incestuous desire) that you feel you can relate to on some primal level but are not totally comfortable with the idea that you can, in fact, relate to them.  I found it fitting when I learned that Rebecca Miller is the daughter of Arthur Miller (and wife of Daniel Day Lewis), as the novel reminded me a lot of a 20th century American play: daringly honest, not afraid to make the reader come face to face with the most unconventional, seemingly grotesque aspects of reality.  The very idea of Pippa sleeping with this 80-year-old man (my grandpa is that age, for goodness' sake!) made me want to vomit.  This concept is taken to another level entirely at the very end of the novel, but I'll leave that for you to experience yourself if you choose to read the book.  I highly recommend that you do.