WOOLF AT THE DOOR?: Pitlor’s Millers are a collective organism, a complex variety of parts, patterns, and processes.
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Heidi Pitlor’s debut novel, as the plural title suggests, is about more than just one person’s significant day. It’s packed with various metaphors for beginnings, not only of life but also love, change and redemption, and the counterweights, death and loss — huge themes woven into a single weekend in the lives of the Miller family as they assemble on an island off the coast of Maine to celebrate Joe Miller’s 75th birthday. What further freights the title is that all three Miller children are expecting. This is a family who don’t know how to pack light.
Eldest son Daniel, the artistic one, brings wife Brenda, who achieved pregnant via sperm donation after he’d been left paraplegic by a bicycle accident. Middle son Jake, the successful one, and wife Liz finally conceived after years of fertility treatment, and they’ve just discovered that she’s carrying twins, what will be an embarrassment of riches before the story is over. Black sheep, rebel, and youngest daughter Hilary is pregnant, single, and not sure who the father is.
At points in the story birth and death parallel each other like inbound/outbound rails. Joe senses the coming of his mortality in his bones. His wife, Ellen, falls for the widower husband of her late best friend.
Pitlor goes after the big medical issues of the day. Daniel is haunted by the specter of the anonymous sperm donor, even giving him a name, Jonathan White, and a physical description. He also obsesses over the stem-cell research that he hopes will repair his injured spine. Ellen has girlish fantasies about her widower, about beginning life and love anew at 70. Yet there’s something forced about the abundance of ripped-from-the-headlines topics. And much of the novel is taken up with the interior monologues of the various Millers as they converge on Great Salt Island. Ellen’s thoughts wander from worries about the identity of the father of Hilary’s baby (“Perhaps he was in prison. . . . Maybe he was married”) to a remembrance of her daughter as a child (“Her lips had always chapped”) to a visit to the Gardner Museum with the widower (“She and MacNeil stood side by side, and for the first time she thought about what it might be like to kiss him”).
This interior drama of contemplation, feelings, and memory recalls Virginia Woolf’s novel of another family vacationing on another island, To The Lighthouse. But Pitlor’s characters are too literal and linear in their thinking to re-create Woolf’s transcendent atmosphere. Free spirit Hilary, for instance, has all the signifying accouterments: the nose ring and tattoos, the San Francisco address, and a compulsion to sleep with the first barista she meets in the Book and Bean.
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The depiction of a family as a collective organism, a complex variety of parts, patterns and processes, is the novel’s real achievement. And the constraints Pitlor visits on her characters pays off in her plotting. She manages the rising tensions of the book so that the family crisis, when it comes, is all the more effective.