The Lake Shore Limited

Four lives, connected in some way by an event that changed the world, now continue to intersect over the years afterwards. Leslie, Billy, Sam, and Rafe--their lives are forever altered. Leslie is comfortably married to Pierce, but her loving connection to her brother Gus is a truly nurturing relationship. Childless, she has become almost like a mother to Gus, since she is fifteen years older. Billy, a playwright, was Gus's live-in lover on that fateful day when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. What nobody knows is that she had already decided to leave Gus, so when he dies as a passenger in one of the planes, she feels like a fraud as she grieves for him. Sam, an architect, who bought property when Leslie was selling real estate many years before, is now divorced; his first wife had died years before and his children, somewhat distant from him, are grown. Sam has harbored feelings for Leslie for many years. Rafe, whose wife suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, is an actor. He is one of the stars in Billy's newest play, called "The Lake Shore Limited"--a play about a terrorist act on a train that leaves people waiting for news of their loved ones, just as many did after 9/11. These characters all connect at the beginning of Billy's play, and then for weeks and months afterwards, in various ways. As the story unfolds, we get to view the interior lives of these characters, as sections are devoted to each one in turn. We see what motivates them, what they're worried about, and what they fear. Their worlds are truly explored and we come to know and understand them. Even empathize with them, despite some of their choices. In the end, I sincerely wanted to know what would happen next with each of them, as we are left at a point in all of their lives where much is unresolved. There's a moment in the story where Billy, the playwright, is reflecting on the success of her play, now that it's over, and feeling some satisfaction that, in her creation of a terrorist act on a train, she has used similar events (from 9/11 and what happened to Gus), but that, in a way, she has memorialized him in as she would not have been able to do otherwise. She sees this as her homage to him, her "not forgetting" Gus. Sue Miller has done it again, with her characters, her plot, the multi-layered story that exposes the dark and light side of the human condition...and she has totally captured the attention of this reader. The Lake Shore Limited definitely earned five stars.

Other reviewers have described the play-within-a-play feature of the plot, which I enjoyed. All in all, I found this book to be engrossing, well-paced, and beautifully written, as I found other Sue Miller books to be. (I personally find it so jarring to see "leisurely" used as an adverb, but I know it's accepted now...)I finished it in 2 days, and am on my way to drop it into a book-loving friend's mailbox. I think Miller presented the 9/11 aspect well, which many writers have failed to do, and I believe a message of the book was this: How DO we use our tragedies and traumas to move our lives forward; how do we transform such events into our own art, into a life fully-lived? By the skillful way she explores all the main characters' actions and interactions, she intriguingly begins to answer these questions. I know some reviewers didn't "like" the characters; I liked them all. I'd love to see a sequel in which Leslie, Rafe, Billy, and/or Sam are featured. All their stories were touching and real to me. One other small complaint: the generic-looking cover art. (If it was supposed to be Billy and Reuben, the proportions were way off!) Mary Lee Moser, author,There and Back: A Journal Companion for Special Needs Parents

Always a great "read," Miller creates here entanglement upon entanglement that stretches the reader's imagination and heart, yet cleverly foreshadows each character's emotional development in her play-within-a play. I found myself coming up for breath from time-to-time to review what I knew and what I didn't, in order to plot my own version of what might lie ahead. I loved it -- very satisfying and a real "thinking reader's" book

Billy (Wilhelmina) Gertz, a loner, who cherishes her independence, has witten a play about an imaginary terrorist attack on the train, The Lake Shore Limited, as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and a man who is waiting to see if his wife is on that train. Billy can empathize with the agony of this character since her young lover, Gus, was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/ll. The novel explores Billy's ambivalent feelings about Gus and her bouts of guilt and depression, as well as the pain Gus's older sister, Leslie, who raised him, suffers. It also tells the story of Rafe, the leading actor in the play, who is facing a tragedy in real life, but who shares a night of unforgettable, and quite unexpected intimacy with Billy, that helps him give the performance of a lifetime. And finally there is Sam, a gifted architect, who has been unlucky in love and wants nothing more to do with it, but is drawn to Billy in spite of himself. How these four characters interact and find new purpose in life as Billy's play opens, makes up the gist of this unusual but compelling novel.

I like Sue Miller, so I was thrilled to find her latest book available through the Vine program. This is a very layered story, each section a character, each character's story overlapping back onto the section before and leading brilliantly into the next...until a satisfying conclusion some 275 pages from the beginning. I won't tell the story; I will say that, as of page forty, I was hooked, for Sue Miller has created a "hook" around which she introduces us to Billy, Gus, Leslie, Rafe, and Sam in particular. Sue deals with characters well into the maturity of life, so the interplay amongst these memorable people should appeal to readers who appreciate meeting men and women with some miles on them, people well beyond that "first love" sort of thing. Sue Miller takes a sort of "no nonsense" approach to the manner in which her story plays out. Relationships explored, choices made...they all make such good sense in her very talented hands. As I was reading, I thought back to the reactions of friends to whom I'd lent my copy of Miller's last book, "The Senator's Wife." There wasn't the enthusiasm, at times, for a book I hadn't so much "enjoyed" as I had appreciated her unfolding, again, of story and the characters inhabiting that story. I think they couldn't appreciate the particular relationship(s) explored in "Wife," rather disliking the younger female character for a choice she had made and the consequences that came with that choice. In "The Lake Shore Limited" Sue Miller again explores the choices, the chances, the morals, the ethics...in particular, perhaps, the chances, the chance encounters that occur when we least expect them and which can alter one's life for the better or worse...and she does so in what I feel is the perfect number of pages in which a very good story can be told...three hundred or less. You won't be disappointed.