A clan ripped, only to ripen

Ordinary life shattered, pain endured, relationships reshaped. When she is on target, no one does it better than Sue Miller, master of the quotidian, who in a story collection and five novels (including “The Good Mother” in 1986 and “While I Was Gone,” an “Oprah” pick in 2000) has explored the sexual currents and domestic complications of our times.

In her gripping and surprising new novel, Miller is at the top of her game. The catalyzing shock of “Lost in the Forest” comes when a careless driver hits John Albemarle as he walks along a village lane in Northern California’s wine country with his wife, Eva, and their 3-year-old son, Theo. The impact sends John crashing into a post, killing him instantly. Eva’s first husband, Mark, is called upon to pick up their two teenage daughters from their grieving mother’s house and take them to stay with him for a few days. Young Theo comes along.

In an effortless flow of subtle and lucid prose, Miller offers us each character as fully human, shaken, vulnerable, flawed, captured in amber light during the year of mourning and its aftermath. Eva is at first inconsolable. It is months before the days begin to seem “normal” again. Emily, Eva and Mark’s older daughter, is saddened and shocked, but is soon occupied with high school life and friends who buffer her. Theo is too young to understand that his father is dead; he talks of showing his dad how well he can swim “in heaven.” Daisy, Eva and Mark’s younger daughter, and the child closest to John, is the most disturbed, yet neither parent seems able to reach her. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the wine country in all its seasons, from the soft green of the vineyards in spring, with the “pure, cold yellow of the mustard flowers,” to the autumnal fragrance of the crush.

One of the accomplishments of “Lost in the Forest” is Miller’s depiction of a father’s helplessly devoted love for his daughters. Mark’s observations of the girls are precise and moving. This flashback, for instance, when Emily is 6, Daisy 3: “Mark felt nearly dizzy with the intensity of his love for both of his daughters, with his consuming adoration of their physical beings, the fascination with every phrase that fell from their lips.” After their births, we learn, Eva has several overwhelmed, isolated years of mothering and Mark has drifted into an affair with a woman who has no children. After a year Mark ends it, Eva finds that the girls are easier to handle and she has a bookstore job she enjoys. They are drifting back together. Then Mark tells Eva about the affair. End of marriage. Eva is angry, which affects Mark’s relationship with his daughters.

Eva’s second husband John, a publisher with family money from land in the valley, is a loving husband and father. By the time he dies, Eva has become less angry with Mark. And as Mark begins taking care of all three children regularly, he is drawn back into his attraction for Eva. Meanwhile, Mark has a father’s ambivalence about seeing his daughters grow up, sharpened by his guilt over breaking up the family. Emily will be in college soon. Daisy is sullen, mysterious. In the end, she is the one who needs him most.

Early in the novel there are references to an adult Daisy talking years later with her therapist about the characters in her family drama, and how John’s kindness to her might have been deliberate. (Perhaps he and her mother had seen how Daisy needed extra attention, with Emily no longer her closest ally and Eva tied up with the baby.) These references to Daisy’s therapy create an intriguing subtext and shift in time, as if the story were skewed forward, made into the past by Daisy’s memories even as it unfolds.

As the story proceeds, the moody, evasive Daisy, who has grown tall like her dad and gangly, begins to occupy center stage. Before long, Daisy, now 15, is enmeshed in an illicit drama of her own. While working part-time at her mother’s bookshop, she is spotted pilfering from the cash register by Duncan, who is married to her mother’s best friend, Gracie. Duncan is a failed actor who became a stuntman, then had a terrible accident. He is sarcastic and opinionated, and he is the first man to notice that Daisy is growing up. One afternoon, he offers her a lift home and implies he will tell her mother she has been stealing. Instead, he drives her to his furniture studio and seduces her. The course of their months-long “affair,” which stops just short of Daisy’s losing her virginity, is sketched in sensual terms, balanced by references to Daisy’s later sessions with her therapist. As Daisy discovers her own power, her father begins to suspect what is going on and acts to change the course of her life.

By the time “Lost in the Forest” ends (with a coda that gives us a glimpse of her as a budding actress), Daisy has become distinctive enough to walk away with the novel. She is a remarkable character -- tough-talking, tender-hearted and intuitively sure-footed enough to make peace with her past and find her own best pathway into the world. *