       |
 |
Whoa! Put your seat belts on when you read this one. Meg Wolitzer blasts out of the starting gate with a great opening line: “The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage …” And the pace never slackens for the rest of the two hundred and eight pages. Joan and her husband Joe are flying first class on their way to Helsinki where Joe is to be awarded a prize in literature, which is second only to the Nobel. Flashbacks, while they are in flight, attending award functions, receiving the prize give us the pieces of this marriage puzzle which has turned to dust. In a nutshell (maybe a walnut shell) the story is about a college professor who marries his much younger, talented writing student and manages to fulfill many a writer’s dream. He becomes a “break-through” writer, one the notables, and now, in his late seventies, he is the winner of the Helsinki prize. Likely drawing from her own experience as a writer, Wolitzer points a razor sharp pen at the famous Iowa Writers Workshop and describes a summer writing camp very much like the famous Bread Loaf camp in Vermont. The story is laced with the proclivities of some famous male authors and writing professors to enjoy the sexual favors of young and adoring writing students. And tracks the emotional highs and lows of writers longing to be recognized and valued. It’s a good story. I find myself wishing I were in a book group so I could discuss this one. There are all kinds of wonderful layers to ponder. Gender issues, marriage issues, and writing method issues — like whether the author (and the narrator) should have told us up front what was at stake,* and even the choice of names for the two main characters: Joe and Joan. I loved this book. Wolitzer’s language is sumptuous, with a clear, honest, and bitingly funny narrator’s voice that makes the story’s pain bearable as well as instructive. By which I mean the story allows us to remember — vicariously — the price paid when we sacrifice our soul. Here’s a sample of her style: “I thought of my own parents, who were as remote as two stalactites hanging side by side in the same cave, never touching in public, my father in his dark suits that smelled leafy and masculine, my mother in her dresses with patterns that gave them the appearance of tablecloths.” (p.59) (Speaking of her first born child) “…her feverish excitement at all new things. If she’d had a tail it would have been continually thumping.” (p.75) “I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels.” (p.78) “But what happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe? The ones who had no attachments to powerful men?” (p.104) “We four wives looked at handmade scarves in a window of one of the local crafts shops…admiring weave and texture and color, then soothed ourselves inside the store, fingering material, gathering our own sensual pleasure where we could. An eggplant-colored shawl had long silken fibers that I ran my hands through as though they were hair.” (p.173 * There is an interesting back and forth on this book and this question among panel members on The Diane Rehm Show. See wamu.org/programs/dr where you can listen to it on-line or order a CD or cassette. It will be listed in the archives for 6/15/05. <back to list |
||||||
