I started this audiobook and found it solid so why I wasn't able to go back to it I don't know ... try again some time.

Later. I did plod on, and although the idea in the novel is intriguing, it wasn't a book I had to pick up.

I see that The Position was written in 2010, 4 years before The Interesting, which I've already read. This novel reminded me a lot of The Interestings. The same kind of intense , unsentimental examination of the characters and their actions. ( )

This is my first fiction in quite a while, if you don't count Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, and I must say that I really chose poorly. I found the book to be totally boring, fairly well written but just not for me. Most of the children (who are the focus of the book) seem to have their own set of not-really-that-important problems that they can't solve on their own. Not recommended.
( )

Good characters, plot a little unconvincing ( )

This is my second Wolitzer novel and I think I'm a fan for life. So good. ( )

This is one of those ‘ennui of modern American life as seen through one dysfunctional family’ novels that I normally avoid like the plague – and indeed, an early chapter featuring yet another melancholy genius worrying about his antidepressants and sexual hang-ups made me fear the worst. But I was strangely won round, mainly thanks to some smart narrative focus which helps keep things tight and under control.

Our main characters are the four children of Roz and Paul Mellow, a couple who achieved notoriety in the seventies by bringing out a Joy of Sex-style lovemaking manual, complete with explicit illustrations of themselves in various acrobatic positions; now, thirty years later, a re-issue is planned, which gives us an excuse to catch up on how their children have dealt with this weight of embarrassment, inspiration, anticipation and disillusion about sex as they've grown up to have their own relationships.

Inasmuch as this is a literary novel about sex, it's remarkably successful. The sex scenes themselves are probably the best bits, pleasingly diverse and realistic and crowded around with the participants' thoughts, anxieties, awkwardnesses. There are plenty of moments in here where you think, oh I've totally thought the same thing, I've never seen a novelist mention that before – or, even better, where Wolitzer makes you feel instant recognition for something that you haven't experienced in exactly that way yourself.

One night, when Roz and Paul were making love, she heard herself command Paul, Fuck me, and she realized that she'd forgotten that this was exactly what he was already doing; she'd been lost inside the act, and it was like listening to music and thinking, I'd like to listen to some music now, because you were so stimulated that you needed an influx of new stimulation, an overlay of something else. Bring on the next thing, you thought, come on, come on, make it snappy.

I said these scenes were realistic, but perhaps ‘plausible’ is a better word. The point is not exactly that you recognise everything as being true to life, but rather that the descriptions are so sharp and so free from cliché, and that what is being described is what is often passed over by other novelists. Verisimilitude is not always required for this to come off well. The man-on-man bits, for instance, sometimes seem more like how a female novelist might imagine gay sex than anything totally naturalistic – a character reminisces about

the wonderful rub of parts that even to this day reminded Dashiell of Boy Scouts, trying to make a fire with two sticks. You could feel boyish and scoutlike in bed.

I'm…pretty sure men don't have sex by rubbing their dicks together, but OK let's go with it. The lesbian encounters are also somewhat detached from reality, not least because they involve one of the lead actresses from Friends (or its fictional stand-in); this, thinks her partner blissfully,

is so amazingly aesthetic. That was the thing about two good-looking women having sex. At first you could almost die from the delicacy, from the long wrists, yoga-bred bodies, and subtle flashes of thin gold chain or ear-stud or pearl-gloss pedicure. Sex between two women now seemed to her like an exclusive club, and in order to join you would need to look like this, and admire yourself and the other person, and feel a great relief that no one else was allowed in.

Again, this is all very nicely written without necessarily being wholly convincing. And lots of other lines could be cited. The female body, in a sexual context, is described as ‘that banshee with its throat sounds and wet center and locked jaw and tree-dweller toes’ – that's weird but it works – and an over-attentive husband is slyly critiqued for approaching sex with his wife with

the kind of interest that men sometimes had in wines or stereo equipment or cars. How did they taste, sound, run? Which was the best one, and what was the best way to try it out?

Also nice to see how many of these scenes are written against the ‘accepted’ narrative of such things – a brilliantly-written moment of childhood sexual abuse, to take the most striking example, is presented as something irritating, strange, curious, but not something overwhelmingly damaging that is supposed to leave lifetime scars. At times like this Wolitzer judges the tone perfectly.

The problem with this book is that there is a fair amount of filler – something slightly rambling about the prose style, something a bit too taking-the-pencil-for-a-walk about many of the scenes, which are apt to digress into the sort of moody ruminations on modern life that you can read in a hundred other lit-fic paperbacks. The long, elaborative, multi-clause sentences that Wolitzer favours when she's looking for literary effect don't quite work for me; the novel's opening paragraph-sentence is a good example of what I mean:

The book was placed on a high shelf in the den, as though it were the only copy in the world and if the children didn't find it they would be forever unaware of the sexual lives of their parents, forever ignorant of the press of hot skin, the overlapping voices, the stir and scrape of the brass headboard as it lightly battered the plaster, creating twin finial-shaped depressions over the years in the wall of the bedroom in which the parents slept, or didn't sleep, depending on the night.

If that works for you then you'll definitely love this book; if you find it a little overwritten and creative-writing-course then you'll understand why I had some problems settling into the narrative voice. But complaining too much seems very unkind with a book like this, which is really a lot of fun and which convinced me that there was an underlying irony and wisdom holding things together; it's endearing, it's perceptive, it's well worth a go for any couples taking a break between ‘Riding St George’ and ‘Electric Forgiveness’. ( )