The Distinguished Guest

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.

How does an author tackle the issue of aging, so as to incorporate a generation's responsibility, a family's loss, and a person's life reflections? Miller deftly works through these issues in this story of famous writer Lily Maynard's battle with Parkinson's disease. When she moves in with her son Alan and his wife Gaby, their lives are irrevocably altered. In addition to the tedium of Lily's daily care and the interruption of their troubled marital relationship, they must bear witness to the loss of her craft, not just the physical act of writing, but her mental acuity, her ability to imagine and relate. With a director's eye for movement and angles of perception, Miller unreels the story like celluloid on screen. One has the overall sense of witnessing a cinematic dinner party where much is discussed and not discussed, where we are privy to characters' internal thoughts and perceptions as well as external conversations, where the focus of the lens--or narrator--shifts fluidly from person to person, creating an insightful representation of relationships, with their judgments, miscommunications, and tenuous connections. As other characters enter the scene with their probing questions and depart, what is created and destroyed, what is shared and withheld, and what is revised and protected is memory, a prime motivator for living and an often unwelcome, but revelatory, guest in the process of grieving. Janet St. John