Wolitzer, Meg: The Wife

Scribner & 2003, 224 pages [amazon]

Just a few paragraphs into Meg Wolitzer's The Wife and already you're hit with one of those sentences you have to go back for so you can taste its phrases a second time:

"No one on this plane was fixated on death right now, the way we'd all been earlier, when, wrapped in the trauma of the roar and the fuel-stink and the distant, braying chorus of Furies trapped inside the engines, an entire planeload of minds--Economy, Business Class, and The Chosen Few--came together as one and urged this plane into the air like an audience willing a psychic's spoon to bend."

The braying Furies for the moment appeased, Joan Castleman and her husband are in mid-air, en route to Finland, where Joe is slated to receive the Helsinki Prize for literature.The braying Furies for the moment appeased, Joan Castleman and her husband are in mid-air, en route to Finland, where Joe is slated to receive the Helsinki Prize for literature. He, at least, is enjoying the trip, and particularly the attentions of the stewardess, from whom he accepts slippers and nuts and cookies while his "ancient mechanism of arousal starts to whir like a knife sharpener inside him."

"If that luscious cookie-woman had stripped to her waist and offered him one of her breasts, mashing the nipple into his mouth with the assured authority of a La Leche commandant, he would have taken it, no questions asked."

Women are drawn to Joe, in part because of his successful career as a novelist, but also because he is one of those "men who own the world." They exude confidence. They are hyperactively sexual. Once among the fluttering women herself, Joan has spent decades watching her husband attract and enjoy others--while she pretended not to notice, or  not to care, and while she subjugated her own talent to labor as his muse. At 35,000 feet in the air, bound for the crowning achievement of Joe's career, Joan decides that it has to stop. She will leave her husband when they get back home, after suffering through the coming bout of accolades.

Starting with the revelation of Joan's decision, The Wife tells the story of the Castleman marriage, from ignominious beginning to polite cohabitation, in a series of reminiscences that, while jumping about chronologically, are never disjointed. Over the book's course the characters of Joe and his wife are revealed--his appetites and egoism, her enabling and skewed priorities--and the secret of their marriage is hinted at, and the tension--incredibly, for this sort of book--builds. When the end comes it is sudden and shocking and yet wholly prepared for. Wolitzer's book is among the best of the book-mom's year in reading. Don't miss it.

Tags: book reviews, books, Meg Wolitzer