2. Lake Shore Limited - Sue Miller

Audio read by the author
2010
8 disks
288 pages
written for adults
Didn't like it (1)
Lovely writing; boring, tedious story; unlikable characters for the most part - it was a pretty endless, repetitive story.

Setting:  Post-9/11 Boston and rural Vermont.
OSS:  Four people connected to a young man who died on 9/11 tell the story of their lives and regrets a few years later.
The title:  The Lake Shore Limited is the title of the play that Billy writes, the catalyst for Billy meeting Sam, and the way that she is able to deal with the death of Gus and her feelings surrounding her own secret guilty feelings about Gus's death on 9/11.

The story weaves in, about, and around the lives of five people from the points-ov-view of four of them.  Gus, raised by his 15-years-older sister, is killed on 9/11.  So even though he is no longer alaive, he's definitely a huge part of the story.

Now, years later, Gus's girlfriend Billy, a playwright, has written a play abouit a husband whose wife might or might not have been killed in a train wreck.  The husband is not filled with grief, he's been having an affair and is not sure how he feels. This is actually a mirror of how Billy feels, she'd been about to break up with Gus, although no one else knows this., Leslie, Gus's sister, has invited her friend Sam to the opening of the play to meet Billy, to perhaps fix them up. Sam had once been in love with Leslie.  His first wife had died of cancer leaving him with three youngish sons, he had remarried and divorced after that. He's tall and good looking, Billy is extremely tiny and good looking.  The fourth voice is of Rafe, the actor who played the husband in the play, who is going though his own heartache - his wife is dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Billy and her dog are particularly unlikable, Sam has incredible snobbish tendencies raise their ugly heads, and Rafe almost seems an unneeded character, I'm not sure why he was included.

I almost stopped listening to this a dozen times, but each time I convinced myself that I'd already spent enough time with it to complete it.  Yuck.  Endless.