EARLY on in Sue Miller's new novel, "The Lake Shore Limited," a middle-aged woman loiters in a dark peeping into the window of a bar. Inside, a much younger woman - vivid a crimson suit, flanked by men, "her legs on display" - throws her head to laugh, "either in pure pleasure or in the wish to convey pure pleasure." The moment is quintessential Miller, touching on the themes that have animated her fiction for the past quarter-century: the potency of sex; the failure of men and women to understand each other; the hunger for a different life. Here too is the hyper-self-consciousness that afflicts her characters, who are forever questioning the authenticity of their feelings. Missing from the book, though, is the high drama that has propelled Miller's previous novels, most memorably "The Good Mother" and "While I Was Gone." Main events are consigned to flashbacks, and what happens in the present is a matter of fragile, easily misconstrued gestures. Attention is split among four characters, loosely connected by the somewhat clunky mechanism of a play (the titular "Lake Shore Limited") about a man who is on the verge of leaving his wife when he learns that she may have been killed in a train bombing. The playwright, Billy, is using her life as material: six years earlier, her lover, Gus - whom she had decided was too "undeveloped, little-boyish" for her - died in the Sept. 11 attacks. In the aftermath, Billy found herself trapped in the role of grieving widow, offered condolences for a loss she didn't feel. Miller pulls no punches, laying bare Billy's almost monstrous self-pity. Leslie, Gus's older sister, is reminiscent of Miller heroines past: married, with reservations. There's a hint of Mrs. Dalloway about her (her most decisive act is to go out to buy flowers), and even in company she seems cocooned in her own thoughts. Rounding out the foursome are Sam, who was once in love with Leslie, and Rafe, an actor whose wife is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. Miller's depiction of illness is devastating. (She has written movingly elsewhere about her father's struggle with Alzheimer's.) Rafe says of his wife: "Her real intimacy, at this point, is with the illness. And I, to keep going, I have to more or less ignore the illness. We're at cross-purposes. I think she feels . . . that I've left her alone with it. And I suppose I have." "The Lake Shore Limited" is perhaps best appreciated as an extended character study. In places the prose drags, and there's too much filler detail, as if Miller weren't sure how to move the story forward without a proper plot. Still, the novel is worth reading for the ruthlessness of its revelations. One character holds "every small kindness she performed for her mother against her"; another balks at reconciling with his estranged wife, considering it "an admission of failure, . . . of being old and used up." In a showstopper of a speech, a husband fillets his marriage: "You know how it is when you're tired and don't feel like having sex. . . . You undress carefully, you expose only a little flesh at a time, so as never to be fully naked, never to seem to be issuing some kind of invitation with your body. . . . There's a parallel thing that happens emotionally after you've lived too carefully around each other too long, always hiding some part of yourself. You stop caring. . . . There's nothing you can say that will charm the other or, for that matter, hurt the other, because nothing you say is ever of any importance at all. Your conversations remain polite, fully clothed, as it were, at all times." What these characters long for, of course, is to be seen unclothed at last. And Miller certainly honors that desire. Miller's themes have included the potency of sex and the failure of men and women to understand each other. Ligaya Mishan is a frequent contributor to The Times.

Four people are bound together by the 9/11 death of a man in Miller's insightful latest. Leslie, older sister and stand-in mother to the late Gus, clings to the notion that Gus had found true love with his girlfriend, Billy, before he was killed. But the truth is more complicated: Billy, a playwright, has written a new play that explores the agonizing hours when a family gathers, not knowing the fate of their mother and wife who was aboard a train that has been bombed. The ambivalent reaction of the woman's husband has shades of Billy and Gus's relationship, particularly the limbo she's been in since he died. Rafe, the actor playing the ambivalent husband, processes his own grief and guilt about his terminally ill wife as he steps more and more into his character. Finally, there's Sam, an old friend Leslie now hopes to set up with Billy. While the plot doesn't have the suspense and zip of The Senator's Wife, Miller's take on post-9/11 America is fascinating and perfectly balanced with her writerly meditations on the destructiveness of trauma and loss, and the creation and experience of art. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Miller (The Senator's Wife) opens doors to the private lives of four people grappling with loss in her latest novel. Leslie, her husband, Pierce, and her close friend Sam attend a play written by Billy, the former lover of Leslie's brother, Gus, who was killed on 9/11. The play, The Lake Shore Limited, seems based on the horror of that fateful day and the complicated feelings it unearthed in those waiting to hear if their loved ones were dead or alive-it jolts Leslie, Billy, Sam, and Rafe, the actor who plays the main character in the play, into a difficult inner struggle that could lead to healing and closure. Verdict Expertly written, this novel plumbs the dark depths of grief and guilt but emerges into the light of self-forgiveness and freedom. Recommended.-Jyna Scheeren, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An ambitious exploration of the interaction between choice and random chance in human relationships, from Miller (The Senator's Wife, 2008, etc.) The book centers on four characters' reactions to the play that one of them has scripted about the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Leslie attends the play of the title with her doctor husband and their architect friend Sam, with whom she once shared vague romantic longings. Playwright Billy was Leslie's younger brother's live-in girlfriend when he died six years earlier on one of the 9/11 planes. Still grieving for Gus, Leslie assumes Billy feels the same sense of loss and is disturbed by Billy's play, which describes the ambivalence of the survivor. The play's hero is a man who learns that a bomb has gone off on the train on which his wife was traveling. Horrified to feel relief that his wife's death would free him to marry his lover, he sends the lover away, and the play ends with his ambiguous greeting to his wife when she returns. As Leslie struggles to understand what the play means about Billy and Gus's relationship, the actor Rafe, who is playing the lead, also finds the play hitting close to home. His wife is dying of ALS, and he is committed to her care. After he sleeps with Billy one night, he brings the loss and guilt he feels about his wife to his performance, the brilliance of which resuscitates his flagging career. Billy has written the play to clear the air. She had decided to leave Gus before he died, but Leslie sucked her into the role of grieving lover. Now Leslie throws Billy together with Sam. He is immediately smitten, but Billy resists. An architect whose first wife died of breast cancer and whose second marriage ended in divorce, Sam allows chance to take its course. Miller raises tantalizing questions about the ethics of love, but the actual drama involving her decent, troubled characters never rises above a simmer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.