Synopses & Reviews
The moving story of a mother and son that touches the deepest concerns about love, art, family, and life
Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and has become a famous writer at age seventy-two. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease and staying with her architect son Alan, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. For Alan, her visit raises old questions about his relationship with her, about the choices he has made in his own life, and about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. Profound and moving, The Distinguished Guest reveals a family trying to understand the meaning of its life together, while confronting inevitable loss and the vision of an immeasurably altered future.
Review
"Like her previous novel, For Love, The Distinguished Guest is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing exploration of middle-aged 'yuppies' in the midst of a domestic crisis. The novel's central characters are an architect and his French wife, a caterer whose domestic skills rival Martha Stewart's. The couple must open their recently empty, House Beautiful-ready nest to the husband's ailing mother, who is on a retirement home waiting list. No average old lady, Lily became famous when she was 72 after she published a memoir about her life with and divorce from a Civil Rights activist and minister. According to her son, however, she was a cold and inadequate mother, and he remains angry about it. A writer invites herself to the Maynard's home so that she can conduct an extended interview with Lily. This tired plot device —a stranger reporting on the doings of the family-in-crisis—wears thin very quickly. In addition, the reader has difficulty sympathizing with these characters because they have no more depth than the characters in a 'B' movie. Miller is at her best when she is describing how Lily's mind deteriorates as her Parkinson's disease worsens. The 'quotations' from Lily's memoir are also beautifully written." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
The Distinguished Guest chronicles the visit of an ailing woman to her son and his family. Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and famous for writing, at age seventy-two, a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage years earlier and the spiritual and political crises that precipitated that rift. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. Her extended stay with her architect son, Alan Maynard, while she awaits relocation to a retirement community, sets the stage for conflicts, reflection, and new understanding. The visit raises questions for Alan about his relation to his mother and to his past, about the choices he has made in his own life, about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. The story moves between Lily and Alan and among others - Alan's loving, wholly grounded French wife Gaby, their two remarkable college-aged sons, a troubled journalist writing a profile of Lily, an African-American graduate student working on a thesis that connects to Lily's history in the early days of the civil rights movement. Pieces of the profile, excerpts from intimate letters and from both Lily's memoir and her fiction, all form part of the rich narrative as it moves toward its dramatic conclusion.
About the Author
Sue Miller is the bestselling author of
While I Was Gone,
The Distinguished Guest,
For Love,
Family Pictures,
Inventing the Abbotts, and
The Good Mother. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.