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"  &amp;quot;When a person is changing, as I am, at what point are they no longer who they were?&amp;quot; Frankie Rowley&amp;#039;s father asks her one afternoon. For Alfie, the question posed is especially disturbing\u2014the former professor&amp;#039;s polymath mind is deteriorating rapidly\u2014but it&amp;#039;s one that often shadows Sue Miller&amp;#039;s novels. What in our life defines us? Defunct marriages and wanderlust play central roles, whether viewed through the eyes of a philandering politician&amp;#039;s spouse in The Senator&amp;#039;s Wife (2008) or a conflicted parent in The Good Mother (1986), and Miller&amp;#039;s latest novel, The Arsonist (Knopf), is no exception as the Rowley family navigates a tense summer in a small New Hampshire town. Frankie, who has spent the past 15 years doing aid work in Africa, arrives in Pomeroy at the beginning of a spate of unsolved arsons. Against the backdrop of a town that&amp;#039;s literally going up in flames, she is confronted with feelings of inadequacy upon beholding her sister&amp;#039;s happy young family, her parents&amp;#039; distressed and disintegrating bond, and the arsons&amp;#039; erosion of an already fraught relationship between Pomeroy&amp;#039;s locals and its summer-only &amp;quot;flatlanders.&amp;quot; But there is new growth, too. She meets Bud Jacobs, a former DC journalist who owns the local paper, and the two begin a languorous romance that Miller&amp;#039;s adroit maneuvering allows us to view with a satisfying ease from both his outlook and hers. Related: ELLE&amp;#039;s Lettres June 2014 Readers&amp;#039; Prize Multiview novels\u2014whodunits especially\u2014can feel gimmicky, but Miller avoids this pitfall by eschewing easy cliff-hangers or narrative deceits. The momentum grows instead from her compassionate handling of these characters; even a wife wishing for the early death of her husband is treated with authorial fairness. When Frankie, frustrated, tries to stop Bud from praising her years spent in Nairobi\u2014her motivations for being there, she says, are &amp;quot;really complicated,&amp;quot; selfish even\u2014he refuses to let her diminish herself. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re coming at this from different places,&amp;quot; he says simply. Not all questions are answered, nor all mysteries solved, but the end of the book is imbued with the same quiet energy that&amp;#039;s been building throughout; it&amp;#039;s not happy, exactly\u2014that would be too easy\u2014but, in true Sue Miller fashion, it&amp;#039;s triumphant. Related: Dorothy Parker&amp;#039;s Still Got it This article appeared in the July 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a14676/sue-miller-the-arsonist-review/>