Two recent novels — Jane Smiley’s Private Life and Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand — examine married life, coming to pretty different conclusions. Smiley’s new novel follows main character Margaret through fifty years of marriage to Andrew, an eccentric, Aspergian astronomer, while Simonson’s novel (her first) follows buttoned-up widower Ernest Pettigrew as he falls for Jasmina, a Pakistani widow and shopkeeper.
Smiley’s novel feels essentially like a tragedy — marriage is a life-long trap for Margaret, who watches Andrew’s flashes of brilliance and then his slow unhinging. Simonson’s novel is part satire, skewering petty racism in small-town England, and part comedy, a contemporary Jane Austen with a 68-year-old man as heroine. For Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali, marriage is a deep, remembered pleasure.
Both writers have such good-humored affection for their introverted, slow-to-act and slow-to-change characters. Simonson’s novel is slighter but optimistic; Smiley’s is heavily researched — we follow Margaret from the late 19th century to the 1940s — and in the end, kind of sad.