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Meg Wolitzer brings her characteristic wit and intelligence to a provocative story about the evolution of a marriage, the nature of partnership, the question of a male or female sensibility, and the place for an ambitious woman in a man's world.
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband Joseph is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop. From this gripping opening, Meg Wolitzer flashes back to Smith College and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and follows the course of the marriage that has brought the couple to this breaking pointâ??one that results in a shocking revelation.
With her skillful storytelling and pitch-perfect observations, Wolitzer has crafted a wise and candid look at the choices all men and women makeâ??in marriage, work, and life… (more)
I had the very great pleasure of meeting Meg Wolitzer at the Iceland Writers Retreat, where she taught an excellent workshop to we starry-eyed writers. So I knew I liked her personally, but that may or may not translate into loving her writing. But It did! I so loved this book that I spent an entire summer Saturday reading it, choking from time to time as she so aptly described being married to “a big man”. I wish my mum-in-law was still alive to share this with. In this book, Wolitzer accurately and succinctly pulls chunks of reality out of her character’s lives, holding them up to view. Anyone who has spent their married life supporting their partner’s career at the expense of their own will immediately relate. There’s pride, but there is also envy, anger, and frustration. The unfairness of being held to promises made while young, while your partner is not...and the heartbreak of the children, abandoned... well, it’s all pretty familiar!
Wolitzer writes with humour and kindness. The woman in this story can find understanding and sympathy for her great man, even as she suffers life with him. The children are sympathetic and knowing. The fellow writers reminded me of the first day at the IWR, all of us jockeying for position!
This is a very true book, in the way only good fiction can be. Highly recommended! ( )
Joseph Castleman is a well-known novelist married to Joan Castleman. Joan has been with her husband since leaving college for the love of her professor. He is a literature professor and has told her that she has a lot of talent. They get together, which undoes Joe's marriage to his wife. They also have a small daughter. Joan goes through her life being Joe's right hand. She watches as he writes, wins awards, gets full of himself, etc. You will be drawn right in with the first sentence of the book. ( )
This is another Now Read This book group read and the first time I have read anything by Meg Wolitzer. I am glad I did and I will not hesitate to pick up more of her books, especially if they are this good. I will admit, a lot of my rating has to do with my surprise at how much I enjoyed it. Others who read more contemporary fiction than I do may find my star rating generous.
Also, the narrative structure of relating many past incidents, catching the reader up, as it were, even though the story starts at it's endpoint was a really effective way of telling the story. I felt like I was sitting in a cafe or bar and having an evening's deep discussion with Joan.
I think I can call the sci-fi/fantasy bubble I used to live in, officially broken. I like that I can pick-up and read just about anything that gets suggested to me and enjoy it. Meg Wolitzer wholly engrossed me in her writing style and the story resonated with me because of the age of the two main characters, Joe and Joan, even though they are a generation older than I am.
It is interesting to compare and contrast The Wife with another book I am currently reading, [b:A Shooting Star|267215|A Shooting Star|Wallace Stegner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386921934s/267215.jpg|659] by [a:Wallace Stegner|157779|Wallace Stegner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1252177524p2/157779.jpg] which is also about a marriage and marital infidelity. I guess there will be more to say when I finish it.
The Goodreads blurb about this book states, "The Wife" is a wise, sharp-eyed, compulsively readable story about a woman forced to confront the sacrifices she's made in order to achieve the life she thought she wanted. But it's also an unusually candid look at the choices all men and women make for themselves, in marriage, work, and life." I can't say this any better. The Wife allowed me to think a lot about the choices I made and my wife made along the way....the points of agreement and disagreement, the failures and the successes...the disappointments and the acceptance.
The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusions of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything right now?
Quotations
As a rule, the men who own the world are hyperactively sexual, though not necessarily with their wives.
All first wives are crazy-- violently and eye-rollingly so
Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life. But it's their choice... They make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that's all over now. We had a women's movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem... We're in a whole new world now. Women are powerful. Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend; they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites pricking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. 'Listen,' we say. 'Everything will be okay.' And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.
'Ah, a Sarah Lawrence girl,' he said with pleasure, deciding at that moment she was a highly creative type, her hands damp with both acrylic paint from art class and ambrosia from some middle-of-the-night winter-solstice ritual."
New York City was a spectacular place in which to take a walk in the middle of the night if you were a young, ambitious, confident man.
Of course she ached to be a writer. Like so many women, she burned for it, all she wanted to do was to publish, and her whole life was leading toward the moment when she found an agent and a publisher and her first book appeared.
I hadn't asked him the question out of actual concern; it was more of a marital reflex. All over the world, husbands and wives routinely and somewhat pointlessly ask one another: Are you okay? It's part of the contract; it's the thing to do, because it implies that you care, that you're paying attention, when in fact you might be deeply and relentlessly bored.
If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it.
It always seemed that the smaller the pie, the greater the need to have more of it.
He was American and introspective and always taking his own pulse on the page. As Harry had said, he was politically correct, yet somehow he wasn't at all political.
I knew that if I were a better person, I would have stayed up with him, the way I used to do each year. But I was tired, and longed for sleep the way I used to long for the press of our two bodies.
I could hear him scrabble around downstairs like a hamster, opening drawers in the kitchen and taking things out, banging together what sounded like a cheese grater and a spoon, in an obvious, pathetic attempt to wake me up.
I knew how he operated; I knew everything about him, the way wives do.
Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice.
For a long time I was as strongly sexual as he was, and then suddenly, somewhere in my forties, I realized that I wasn't anymore, that it had simply gone away, taking with it my happiness, my willingness, my sense of being Joe Castleman's other half.
"Do you know that you're a totally pathetic person?" I said. "I trust you mean 'pathetic' in the best sense of the word," said Joe with a slight smile.
But still, somehow, everything would be all right, because he had a wife, which is something that everyone needs.
The connection was infused with a crackle and the slightest quality that suggested both voices were trapped in a time-delay tunnel.
"This is the beginning of a new phase, Joan." "Yes, the insufferable phase," I said.
Joe Castleman knew he was special, though not so special that he could avoid the things of everyday life.
"I want to jump," he said. "Like the kids used to." I thought of David and Susannah and Alice, and the way their small bodies had shot up into the air, pajamas flapping, shrieks of pleasure accompanying each jump. Why do children love to jump?
"Oh, come on, Joanie." It was a name he hadn't called me in a very long time, and he understood that the siren call of it would have an effect. It did. Despite myself, it roused something in me. I was an idiot to be taken in again and again by him, wasn't I? To celebrate him, to sing him, but I couldn't find it in me to be any other way. It took a moment, but finally I brought myself to a wobbly standing position on the bed.
They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone.
I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary.
Bancroft Road was dark, with no streetlamps, and I could see into front windows where faculty members and their wives and children shuffled around living rooms. Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn't exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood?
Language only felt infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.
I knew what I was up against, that women would fling themselves at him like lemmings who had a love-wish instead of a death-wish.
Virgin writers have a sheen to them, a layer of something that comes off on your fingers when you touch it, like powder from a moth's wings.
"They'll be fine," Joe said, a father's refrain, based on nothing except the intolerance of the possibility of disaster
Most of these young men were writing their own novels: long, rambling, "ambitious" books that weighed as much as full-term infants.
He was terrified of death. More immediately, he was terrified of sleep, death's dress rehearsal.
We gave them everything we had. All our possessions were theirs. Our children were theirs. Our lives belonged to them. Our weary, been-through-the-mill bodies were theirs, too, though more often than not they didn't want them anymore.
Bats circled the pines all around our cottage and sometimes hung like change purses from the roof of our veranda, and the night bristled with forest-bright animal eyes, and the arrhythmic clicking of strange bugs that I hoped never to see, but which I'd simply agreed to live among for twelve days.
"Every marriage is just two people striking a bargain"
Last words
"Joe was a wonderful writer," I said. "And I will always miss him."
Meg Wolitzer brings her characteristic wit and intelligence to a provocative story about the evolution of a marriage, the nature of partnership, the question of a male or female sensibility, and the place for an ambitious woman in a man's world.
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband Joseph is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop. From this gripping opening, Meg Wolitzer flashes back to Smith College and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and follows the course of the marriage that has brought the couple to this breaking pointâ??one that results in a shocking revelation.
With her skillful storytelling and pitch-perfect observations, Wolitzer has crafted a wise and candid look at the choices all men and women makeâ??in marriage, work, and life
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Book description
On the eve of her husband's receipt of a prestigious literary award, Joan Castleman, who has put her own writing ambitions on hold to support her husband, evaluates her choices and decides to end the marriage. -WorldCat abstract
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So I knew I liked her personally, but that may or may not translate into loving her writing.
But It did! I so loved this book that I spent an entire summer Saturday reading it, choking from time to time as she so aptly described being married to “a big man”. I wish my mum-in-law was still alive to share this with.
In this book, Wolitzer accurately and succinctly pulls chunks of reality out of her character’s lives, holding them up to view. Anyone who has spent their married life supporting their partner’s career at the expense of their own will immediately relate. There’s pride, but there is also envy, anger, and frustration. The unfairness of being held to promises made while young, while your partner is not...and the heartbreak of the children, abandoned... well, it’s all pretty familiar!
Wolitzer writes with humour and kindness. The woman in this story can find understanding and sympathy for her great man, even as she suffers life with him. The children are sympathetic and knowing. The fellow writers reminded me of the first day at the IWR, all of us jockeying for position!
This is a very true book, in the way only good fiction can be. Highly recommended! (