I’m going to keep this short because Alex Miller is one of my favourite authors and it pains me to write that I am disappointed by his latest work.
It’s an awkward experiment in creative non-fiction: in the blurb Miller describes it as fictional autobiography:
My opportunity in old age to review my life and to celebrate the lives of loved ones, and to do this in the form of story.
The ‘story’ consists of occasional short first person meditations deriving from the author’s present, which punctuate a much longer chronological third person account of an alter ego named Robert Croft, detailing his early struggle to become a writer and the misadventure of a hasty marriage. Since the hapless reader does not know how much of what Miller writes is a mask for real events and real people (and a real wife in particular), the experience of reading it is a bit like those awkward encounters with a friend who one day reveals that his wife doesn’t understand him. Reading The Passage of Love feels like reluctantly eavesdropping on a private life. At its conclusion one still doesn’t know what to believe and the empathetic response wrestles with doubts about aspects of it and the temptation to be curious about her side of the story. (The wife is a character whose portrait veers between a person with a destructive personality and one with a mental illness. It comes as a relief to learn that she is dead and not reading about herself like this.)
This uneasy intimacy seems to struggle with an authorial instinct for reticence. The book is nearly 600 pages long but the sparse moments of self-reflection wrestle with a great deal of nostalgic detail that most editors would have pruned savagely had it come from a less prestigious author. At page 350 I noted with exasperation that Robert Croft still wasn’t writing, much less getting published, and I plodded on – in disbelief that this very disappointing book was penned by Alex Miller, an author whose books I have always enjoyed.
Oh, and I became very tired of the incessant references to cigarettes! Almost everything that happens is punctuated by finding them, lighting them, locating an ashtray, stubbing them out, sharing them… if I had this book on Kindle I could tally how many instances there are but I don’t need to do that to know that these obsessive references to smoking are tedious.
Author: Alex Miller
Title: The Passage of Love
Publisher: Allen and Unwin, 2017
ISBN: 9781760297343
Review copy courtesy of Allen and Unwin
Available from Fishpond: The Passage of Love
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
Well Well. He is an author that I also enjoy and have reserved this book so will be interesting to see if I have a similar view.
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By: Fay Kennedy on December 1, 2017
at 10:52 am
It’s definitely not what I expected, Fay. There are heaps of 5-star reviews at Goodreads but they seem to be for giveaway copies ‘in exchange for an honest review’ so I don’t know what to make of it. Do let me know if you think I’ve been unfair, please.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 1, 2017
at 10:56 am
I ABSOLUTELY didn’t get involved in what was fiction and what was autobiographical fact. I just read it as a WONDERFUL book, with superbly drawn characters. Might end up being my FAVOURITE Alex Miller, which says something , coming from me.
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By: Lesley Moseley on March 8, 2018
at 10:39 am
What a shame. I think sometimes successful authors feel pressured to write another book but it’s hard to reproduce earlier successes. Same for singers, actors … I’ll still try to read it.
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By: ablay1 on December 1, 2017
at 12:30 pm
Well, he might also have been intrigued by the current vogue for ‘creative non-fiction’ and thought that it suited his purposes best.
I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it:)
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By: Lisa Hill on December 1, 2017
at 3:11 pm
I totally disagree with your reading of this book, along with the reading of many other reviewers who have been distracted by the notion that it is Alex Miller’s own story. All of his novels are to some extent aspects of his life. Sexism is so deeply embedded in our reading that even women reviewers don’t really look at what’s happening but assume the man must be the most important feature of the book, dismissing Lena as mentally ill or anorexic or invalidating her in some other way, while she struggles, frantically at first, to find a way out of the iron cage of social and community expectation that is literally suffocating her.
Fortunately readers are loving the book and booksellers are getting wonderful feedback from them everywhere.
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By: Stephanie Miller on December 1, 2017
at 2:07 pm
Hello Stephanie, thank you for sharing your opinion:)
I hope you didn’t think I was invalidating Lena: even if this this character is mentally ill or anorexic (which is what I think he implies), that wouldn’t invalidate her IMO. Having a mental illness – while it might make things worse (especially if untreated) – doesn’t mean that all the problems of life are attributable to that, not at all.
I think the book shows that both of them are struggling to escape community expectations, and both of them appear to suffer extreme stress because of it. (He talks about suicide as the story goes on). But I do think the book is primarily about him and his struggle, and that the character of Lena is there to portray the conflict between his duty to care for her and his desire to write.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 1, 2017
at 3:22 pm
I agree that Alex Miller can be a beautiful writer but there is something about the way he writes about women that makes me uncomfortable. But I have left that unexamined, so have no real insights to offer. Maybe it’s time I examined it.
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By: Joanna Baker on December 2, 2017
at 10:37 am
*chuckle* Let me know if you do a post about it!
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By: Lisa Hill on December 2, 2017
at 1:53 pm
I was tempted by the combination of important Australian author and creative non-fiction but 600 pp? No thank you.
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By: wadholloway on December 2, 2017
at 9:55 am
600pp can be fine if the book is engaging, but I must admit that I put off reading it for a bit because of its length.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 2, 2017
at 1:54 pm
I am loving it so much, 600 pages will NOT be long enough. Sorry, I am glad I disregarded your opinion, (NOT A FREE COPY IN EXCHANGE….) Read it as a story and don’t get caught up in anything else.
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By: Lesley Moseley on March 8, 2018
at 10:44 am
Hello Lesley, I am pleased that you took no notice… anything here is always only one person’s opinion and books that suit one person won’t necessarily suit another. I’d like to thank you for coming here to express your enjoyment of the book because I do like to have balance and at the time I wrote this I couldn’t find any reviews online to offer an alternative opinion to mine. Happy reading!
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By: Lisa Hill on March 8, 2018
at 11:14 am
Thanks for the thoughtful words. Looking forward to reading it anyway, to see what I think. I am uncomfortable about this author. It is something to do with his “importance”. But he can be stunning.
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By: Joanna Baker on December 2, 2017
at 10:40 am
Apart from the quality of his writing, I think his significance derives from Journey to the Stone Country. I remember reading this when it won the Miles Franklin, it seems forever ago now, and (apart from Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia) it was one of the first books I’d read that acknowledged Australia’s Indigenous heart. These days there are all those arguments about appropriation and so on, but back then, it felt like a relief to find a storyteller who wasn’t airbrushing Aborigines away.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 2, 2017
at 2:01 pm
[…] The Passage of Love (2017, see my review […]
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By: Meet an Aussie author: Alex Miller | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on December 3, 2017
at 11:12 am
Thank goodness!
I’m so pleased to read this. I abandoned the book after about 50 pgs in despair & huge disappointment, but my colleagues loved it, so I thought it was just me.
My brief reason why I snap fined the book is st the end of this post – http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/abandon-all-hope.html?m=1
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By: Brona on December 4, 2017
at 12:54 pm
Hi Brona, it’s the disappointment that rankles most. I’m sure we all look forward to a new release by our favourite authors and it can almost feel like betrayal when the book doesn’t measure up to what we’re expecting… (Which is totally unreasonable of course, I know. But still…)
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By: Lisa Hill on December 4, 2017
at 3:18 pm
Hi Lisa, I am one who loved this read. I had no expectations, but I do like Alex Miller’s writing style. I think Alex Miller writes from the heart. His descriptions and observations of characters and environment are so revealing.
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By: Meg on December 5, 2017
at 9:02 pm
Yes, I would agree with that, that this is written from the heart. But I think he’s holding back as well.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 5, 2017
at 9:28 pm
[…] of Nature by Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan Australia) The Choke by Sofie Laguna (Allen & Unwin) The Passage of Love by Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin) The Secrets She Keeps by Michael Robotham (Hachette Australia) […]
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By: 2018 Indie Book Awards longlist | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on December 6, 2017
at 12:59 pm
[…] The Passage of Love, by Alex Miller […]
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By: A Year in First Lines (2017) | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on December 10, 2017
at 12:00 am
[…] The Passage of Love, by Alex Miller, (Allen & Unwin) see my review […]
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By: 2018 ALS Gold Medal longlist | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on March 19, 2018
at 5:35 pm
This book nearly broke my heart, Lisa! I felt slightly mollified by your review. It is still sitting on my bedside table because I could not finish it and could not bring myself to put it away. I have loved Alex miller’s writing and while I know we all part company with favourite authors from time to time as years pass (Margaret Drabble, Shirley Hazzard, Ian McEwan) I did not think it would happen with Alex Miller. I wish he had stopped before this book. It felt self-indulgent and awkward and I did not want to believe it.
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By: Jan Wallace Dickinson on May 17, 2018
at 6:12 am
It’s a book that seems to have divided people. I can understand not finishing it, it took me a while to read it because it was too easy to put it aside and read something else.
But as we see from the comments above, there are others who really loved it. As they say, a book becomes different things to different readers because we each bring different experiences to the reading…
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By: Lisa Hill on May 17, 2018
at 9:26 am
It’s so true and a good thing too. Many books I find fascinating leave many others wondering what it was all about. Not only does a book become different things to different readers, it becomes the reader’s own and not even any longer the author’s in a certain sense, once it is out on its own in the world. A reader saw something in mine that I did not see at all.
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By: Jan Wallace Dickinson on May 17, 2018
at 10:32 am
I think that’s why some people feel personally offended if other readers don’t like ‘their’ book!
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By: Lisa Hill on May 17, 2018
at 10:51 am