04/13/2020
This thoughtful and meditative study from Victorian literature professor Miller (The Burdens of Perfection ) is wonderfully lucid about murky questions of what might have been. Reflecting on the question of how one’s life might have been different with different choices or under different circumstances, he asserts that storytellers are naturally drawn to exploring “unled lives.” Miller moves fluidly between examples that include novels (Mrs. Dalloway ), films (It’s a Wonderful Life ), and poems (“The Road Not Taken”) to show that “unled lives lead to story.” The feeling that one can determine the direction of one’s own life “is a luxury given to those born to choice and chance,” Miller writes, and demonstrates this in an analysis of Jessie Redmom Fauset’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Plum Bun , about the lives of two African-American sisters, one of whom passes for white. Meanwhile, Miller’s analysis of romantic relationships in Sharon Olds’s poetry collection Stag’s Leap , and Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” suggests that everyone has an opportunity to be someone else when combining their life with someone else’s. Both literature specialists, who will appreciate Miller’s breadth of examples, and general readers, who can enjoy the universal topics he explores, will find much food for thought in this pleasant work. (June)
Deeply reflective and at the same time uncommonly readable…Although no book of literary criticism can be accused of being a page turner, On Not Being Someone Else comes close.
Excellent…For Miller, imagining who we might have been or once were, or who we might yet become, is anything but frivolous…In spirited and incisive close readings of texts like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken,’ Carl Dennis’s ‘The God Who Loves You,’ and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (among many, many others), Miller pursues this slippery, elusive meaning and the many questions it leaves unanswered…The idea of unled lives could hardly be more resonant…How many literary scholars today write so engagingly?
Commonweal - Morten Høi Jensen
I wish I had written this book—a wish that is surely the best response to reading it… Cosmic metaphysical speculation is combined with, and conveyed through, meticulous analysis of pictures, poems, novels and films…Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art.
Times Higher Education - Jane O’Grady
A one-of-a-kind book that is at once literary and personal, drawing the reader into a world of reflection about the nature of the lives we have not lived. Why do we return to the past in order to understand who we are now? This is a profound question, and this book explores its possible answers more acutely, more humanly, than anything I have seen on the subject.
2020-03-03
The examples begin with “The Road Not Taken,” “the classic poem of unled lives,” but Miller, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, extends that theme all the way through It’s a Wonderful Life and Jenny Offill’s contemporary novel Dept. of Speculation . The author also ponders the possibilities of those alternate lives in his own mind, inviting readers to do the same. He describes how the early stages of a life (or novel or story) have expansive possibilities, how critical choices narrow those possibilities—through marriage, geography, vocation, etc.—and how the resulting narrow road leaves us pondering those roads that led in different directions. Miller shows how this recognition of unled lives informs fiction, how characters define their lives in contrast to those not led, how novelists acknowledge that their artistic choices don’t preclude reflection on others they might have chosen, and how plotlines that seem inevitable might have taken different turns. “Regret and relief are the emotions we’ve seen most often in these stories, and regret much more often than relief,” he writes. “Either may be overwhelming, but neither is obscure. Their sources are usually clear.” However, the way in which characters realize that they could have been this or could have done that isn’t limited to the page; the process invites empathy from readers, who may realize that their own identities have been circumscribed by the lives not lived and choices not made. “Regret and relief may be the most familiar signs of our unled lives, but this heartbreaking beauty is the most moving to me,” writes Miller. “It’s the freedom and loneliness of middle age.” The author proceeds from close readings of Dickens, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf to a particularly incisive examination of the narrative strategy in Ian McEwan’s Atonement .
A strong, pleasing work that is as much about living as about reading and writing.
I wish I had written this book—a wish that is surely the best response to reading it… Cosmic metaphysical speculation is combined with, and conveyed through, meticulous analysis of pictures, poems, novels and films…Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art.
Times Higher Education - Jane O’Grady
Excellent…For Miller, imagining who we might have been or once were, or who we might yet become, is anything but frivolous…In spirited and incisive close readings of texts like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken,’ Carl Dennis’s ‘The God Who Loves You,’ and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (among many, many others), Miller pursues this slippery, elusive meaning and the many questions it leaves unanswered…The idea of unled lives could hardly be more resonant…How many literary scholars today write so engagingly?
A one-of-a-kind book that is at once literary and personal, drawing us into a world of reflection about lives we have not lived. Why do we return to the past to understand who we are now? This is a profound question, and this book explores possible answers more acutely than anything I have seen on the subject.
A book of admirable insight and sensitivity…Throughout this quiet, engrossing book, Miller aptly reveals the uncanny mesmerism of the unlived life, of the untaken road—our very modern preoccupation with who we are not…This is a text fresh and alive with the power and mystery of art, steeped in feeling, and, like life itself, resplendent with possibilities as yet unrealized, with knowledge not yet known.
Philosophy Now - Alexandre Leskanich
Blend[s] literary criticism and personal essay into a beguiling hybrid…Will remain widely compelling for a long time to come, not only because of [its] many discrete merits, but because of [its] readership’s new intimacy with the ‘unled lives’ of lockdown and quarantine.
Journal of Victorian Culture - Elizabeth Brogden
Shows that the idea of lives unled is stitched into works of art across genres and across centuries, making clear that the stories we tell are often rooted in considering alternatives to the choices we’ve made.
PopMatters - Linda Levitt
A thoughtful, generous, amusing, tender, meandering, self-deprecating, wistful, even reverent style of thinking about our lives in relation to the stories we read.
Public Books - Matthew Rubery
Counts the ways in which narratives of unlived lives can examine or come to terms with the present…Miller believes, in short, that stories of unled lives make real life livelier…[A] capacious book.
Times Literary Supplement - Daisy Hildyard
A compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been…We have unled lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hands; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time…Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities.
New Yorker - Joshua Rothman
What a provocative book! It is interesting and alive on every page, and entertaining the idea of a different life is a profound experience.
An expertly curated tour of regret and envy in literature…By approaching regret and envy from multiple angles, Miller’s insightful and moving book—both in his own discussion and in the tales he recounts—gently nudges us toward consolation. Yes, we might live only one among countless possible lives, and those we haven’t lived will haunt us. But, as Miller notes in conclusion, at least we have had the chance to live the one life that has been given to us.
Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something: the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book.
Fascinating.
The Times - David Aaronovitch
[A] marvelous, melancholic, middle-aged meditation on the meaning of lives unled…Miller is a profoundly gifted close reader—someone whose company one would like to keep, and return to again and again.
Victorian Studies - David LaRocca
On Not Being Someone Else reminds us just how alluring and confounding our singularity is and how, through literature, we make sense of being ourselves. To be someone—to be anyone—is about being someone and not being someone else. Miller’s amused and inspired book is utterly compelling about this, and about so much else.
Miller’s book is a poetics of the unled life, a poetics of ‘what if…’ Through poems, novels, films, philosophy, and psychoanalysis—the texts of our modernity—Miller leads us to profound questions about the imagination, the self and identity, history, marriage, children, regret, atonement, storytelling, and the ethics of choice. Above all, he makes us feel the pressure and immediacy of possibility, the road not taken.
