KEY POINTS:
So far, Rebecca Miller has written and directed Personal Velocity (originally her collection of short stories) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is already in pre-production, with Robin Wright Penn signed up for the title role.
Like The Ballad of Jack and Rose, this delicate, dreamy novel tells the story of an outsider for whom the ties of blood and marriage are both trap and salvation. As the wife of film star Daniel Day-Lewis (who is working as a carpenter on the film's scenery) and the daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller, it's no doubt a paradox with which Miller is exquisitely familiar.
A refugee from a troubled childhood, Pippa has nestled into the shade cast by her mighty husband, Herb, last of the great American publishers and her senior by 30 years. There she apparently flourishes, lulled by her role as helpmeet, thrower of dinner parties, charmer of writers, purveyor of endless plates of butterflied lamb.
To be judged according to how well she succeeds in the drag act of bourgeois wife allows her to dodge, at least temp-orarily, the duty of discovering her own identity. This simulacrum of Stepford wifehood (as the novel opens, Pippa and Herb have abandoned New York's Gramercy Park for a retirement community nicknamed Wrinkle Village) is already cracking.
For Herb, the move is "a sort of pre-emptive strike against decrepitude", but it sets his wife teetering on the edge of a breakdown that may in fact be a breakthrough or break-out for her long-concealed self.
At night a different Pippa emerges; sleepwalking, she feasts on peanut butter and leaves a mess of eggs to congeal on the gleaming surface of her kitchen table. This slumbering creature with her alarming appetites horrifies the polished, glossy woman who appears by day. Caught on camera she appears "inhuman"; none the less she is the repository of the real Pippa.
Despite the drama of her midnight escapades, Pippa is a character notably lacking in definition, her misery a languorously blurred affair. It takes a switch from the third person to the first for her to shoot into focus, grasping hold of the narrative and rediscovering her past in a sensuous, kaleidoscopic rush that starts with her birth ("I emerged from Suky's womb fulsome and alert, fat as a six-month-old and covered in fine, black fur") and careens through to the snowy day she, Herb and their twins became "a unit apart from the world".
It's a journey (revealed via such modishly titled chapters as "And Another Thing" and "Aha!") that sees Pippa reel from intense childhood symbiosis with her red-haired, Dexedrine-addicted mother to her own speed-freak years in New York, via such lesser-frequented junctions on the highway of teen rebellion as starring in an S&M film with her aunt's lesbian lover.
The more wild and unhinged from any sort of responsibility or routine she grows, the more dissociated her voice becomes: a narcotic deadpan that glides over the terrible ends that await her mother and Herb's second wife with a boneless, near-sinister grace.
As an index of damage - inflicted by a smothering mother who was still bottle-feeding Pippa when she was 16 - this is both accurate and disturbing. It is not until the narrative returns to the present that Pippa slides from vital to vapid.
The double hammer-blow of losses she suffers in the final pages is shrugged off so swiftly, its effect is barely registered before being co-opted as the prod needed for Pippa to escape her stunted marital life. "I try to remember my other life, the one I left, but it is evaporating from my mind," she explains in one last breathless monologue, delivered, in an apparent attack of amnesia, on the very day of leaving.
"I can remember images - Herb, the house in Marigold Village, my favourite vegetable knife - but they are bloodless and unreal ... I feel an unfamiliar story unfurling in me ... I am filled with joy and happiness." Though clearly meant to deliver the exhilaration of a woman restored to herself, it's Pippa who seems bloodless and somnambulant, a sleepwalker to the last.
If the flatness of tone diminishes emotional sympathy, it does at least preserve the world in which Pippa moves with frosty clarity. Miller is a luminous writer and the visual impact of her sentences carry something of the cool impersonality of an Edward Hopper painting.
Strange images linger: a glass house, a wounded fawn, a gun dangling "like the droopy head of a fading flower". But Pippa is too vacant to bear the emotional scrutiny to which Miller subjects her.
It remains to be seen how film fleshes her out; in the meantime, gazing into these multiple private Pippas is like opening a series of Russian dolls, each intricately wrought, self-contained and self-revealing, and each just as empty as the last.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Rebecca Miller (Text $32.95)
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