Millers Valley

Miller's Valley: A Novel

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In this novel, where so much is about what vanishes, there is also a deep beating heart, of what also stays.

Miller's Valley

Miriam pushes her smart daughter to consider college, and other women—a teacher, a doctor, a benefactor—will raise Mimi up past the raging waters that swirl in her heart. Eleven-year-old Mimi Miller's family farm is threatened by a dam project.

Quindlen's latest novel, following Still Life with Breadcrumbs, is a moving exploration of family and notions of home. Mimi Miller recounts her life beginning in the s in Miller's Valley, a small Pennsylvania town where her family has been firmly rooted for generations. Government officials warn that a flood could drown the family farm, and Mimi observes her community's reactions while trying to reconcile her own ambitions with her loyalty to home.

Her father refuses to relocate, and seeing his stubbornness, Mimi begins to understand her mother's own unrealized dreams. She also wonders about her reclusive aunt, who lives in a small house on their property and never ventures outside. She watches as her brother, Tommy, tries to escape a feeling of stagnancy by enlisting in the military, only to find himself more trapped than before. Meanwhile, she forges her own escapes into school, romance, and sex. There was just a handful of us in the way.

Everyone was waiting for my mother to fight, although no one ever said that. It was that she was someone, Miriam Miller. There are just some people like that. I drove up from the city for that one meeting at the church, even though she said there was no need for me to miss school or work, even though my desk was piled high with things that needed to be done.

I know that now. I learned that then. The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields. Sure enough, two more skittered out. They froze there, staring, then moved on. I was ready to start talking again when my mother spoke.

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Sometimes, all these years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear one or the other, the faint pounding of the throttle or the murmur of those two low voices. On a wet night the best I could ever make out was a little muttering even if my mother and father were talking loud. If you properly maintain it, and my father did, a sump pump makes a throaty chug-a-chug noise, sort of like a train without the whistle.

My brother Tommy always said he liked the sound, but I think it was because it meant he could sneak out at night without anyone hearing. My room was in the back corner of the house, right over where the sump pump sat on the cement basement floor two stories below.

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She kept at least one light on all night long. I liked looking out and seeing that light in the darkness, something that had always been there, that I could count on.

It was real quiet most of the time around our house at night, so quiet that sometimes I could tell what Aunt Ruth was watching on television because I could hear the theme song of The Dick Van Dyke Show. There was a heating vent right behind the head of my bed, and if you followed it down it stopped at the heating vent behind the kitchen table before it ended up at the old cast--iron furnace in the basement. When I was five I thought my room was haunted because just as I was dropping off to sleep I would hear a moaning sound underneath my bed.

If it had been LaRhonda listening, the whole town would have known, too.

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You could close that heating vent with a little chain at one corner, and I always did when LaRhonda slept over. But the rest of the time I paid attention to whatever I managed to hear. From what I hear Bernie has plenty of female companionship. Gossip, my father would say.

Then silence, and I would fall asleep. Or, That baby is going right into the state hospital, no questions asked, my mother might say. Sadder to keep it at home, my mother would say. Guess so, my father would say. She was always sure of things. Over the years there was a lot of talk about that at night in the kitchen.

Talked to Bob Anderson yesterday, my mother might say. Got no business with a real estate agent, my father replied. Asking for you, my mother said. Fine right where I am, my father said. Clattering pans in the sink. Tap running. Why I even bother, my mother said. When he wanted to he could move through the house like a ghost, even when he was drunk. Maybe especially when he was drunk. Not listening to one more word on the subject, said my father. It was confusing, having a good-looking brother. Donald says he talked to his grandfather, too. The damn dam.

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The old guys say that when they built the dam, when they were all kids, there was a big fight about it. They want to flood the whole valley out. I knew about the dam. It was named after President Roosevelt, but the one with the mustache and the eyeglasses, not the one with the Scottie dog and the wife with the big teeth. A lot of the kids were bored by the description of cubic feet and gallons, but we all perked right up when the guide said four workers had died building the dam.

It was mainly out-of-town people who went to the river. The fishing was better in the streams in the valley, although you had to be pretty good at fly casting to get around the overhanging branches. My parents passed by on the way to their room. Both of us knew our parents were talking about him. He had handwriting so bad that there was no one who could read it. The only tests in high school where he had a fighting chance were true and false, although even there he occasionally made an F that looked too much like a T. But then he was out in the world and found it hard to make a living with nothing but his easy ways.

Mimi Miller tells about her life with intimacy and honesty. As Mimi eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes the people around her, she discovers more and more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities of friendship and the risks of passion, loyalty, and love. The Miller family is just one of those who have stayed here, known here, lived here for years.

They are as much part of this town as it is of them. The farm is their livelihood and their life in every sense of the word. The Miller family are a community in themselves — fractured relations, a back sheep of the family, and a dark dark secret tucked away.

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