Anna Quindlen’s ‘Miller’s Valley’ deftly weaves a town’s demise with girl’s growing up

Mimi Miller can suss out the truth about people and situations. She inherited that from her mother, a nurse, who, either intuitively or as a confidante, knows everything about everyone in Miller’s Valley.

Much of Anna Quindlen’s new novel, “Miller’s Valley,” is set during Mimi’s formative years on a tract of farmland in Pennsylvania that’s been passed down through the Miller family for about 400 years.

Her brothers are older: one is successful and lives elsewhere, the other, always a little wild, was completely ruined by his deployment to Vietnam. Peculiar Aunt Ruth, the mother’s younger sister, lives in a house on the family’s property but hasn’t set foot outdoors for more than a decade.

As she has in other novels, most recently “Still Life with Bread Crumbs,” Quindlen rocks the reader into a comfortable place with the steady ebb and flow of everyday events — but the more comfortable you get, the more you should pay attention to what’s afoot.

Because Mimi and her mother are perceptive, the government man trying to buy the local residents’ 6,400 acres doesn’t surprise either woman — they do wish he’d stop coming around, though.

The Valley Federal Recreation Area had been in the works for years; the idea was to flood Miller’s Valley to create a lake. By the late 1960s, Mimi’s mother says to go ahead and let the town drown for it — for her, the meaning of life isn’t confined to a geographical area. And maybe she doesn’t mind the idea of erasing a life she would have liked to live differently — the sort of life she doesn’t want for her daughter.

The town’s story parallels that of Mimi’s.

Most of the valley’s people spend years fighting the plan. But Mimi does her homework and learns that engineers had blocked the flow of the river out of the dam, purposely causing water levels behind to ever-so-gradually rise.

She wants to yell at the government man, “What we thought was nature letting more and more water take over the valley wasn’t nature at all. You all made it happen. It was slick and it was smart, deciding that one way to convince people to leave was to drown them little by little, by inches instead of all at once.”

“Little by little, by inches instead of all at once,” is, of course, how change happens, how life progresses, how children grow up.

Mimi’s mother and brother worry that life will overtake Mimi all at once rather than inch by inch. They warn her not to get sidetracked from her studies. They warn her to better herself through education and good choices and not get stuck in Miller’s Valley, which we know won’t last, any more than childhood will.

“Miller’s Valley,” like many of Quindlen’s novels — with the exception of the soul-jarring “Every Last One” — isn’t full of drama. Rather, it’s a portrait of what it is to live and age, fueled by insight into the human condition.

Mimi learns to right her course; to let her adult-self rise to the surface.

The confluence of the two threads is powerfully rendered: a perfect storm of misery hits Mimi just as she should begin college. “I guess there are times in your life that tell you what you’re made of. … This was my time.”

And, inevitably, the town’s time comes, too.

This story was originally published April 16, 2016 at 8:02 AM with the headline "Anna Quindlen’s ‘Miller’s Valley’ deftly weaves a town’s demise with girl’s growing up."