When you read a lot, books tend to converse with each other in your head. Right now in mine The Wife by Meg Wolitzer is conversing with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying - both of which I read for different book clubs.
"Wives tend, they hover," Wolitzer writes. "Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrap 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."
Her novel addresses the fallout of this function of being a wife - in the lives of Joe and Joan Castleman. It opens on a plane to Helsinki, where they are flying so that Joe Castleman can receive the Helsinki Prize for Fiction. The novel is narrated by Joan, who has decided she's going to leave him, and as the story unfolds we grow to understand just how much she's had to do with making Joe into the acclaimed writer he is.
She meets him as a talented writing student of Joe's at Smith College. They begin an affair which blossoms into marriage and then into other collaborations. She stops writing her own work, gets an editing job, raises his children, disregards his infidelities and makes him who he is in the eyes of the world.
I became a wife (for the second time) in the 1980s, so some of the things that concern a wife in those far off decades happened to me as well: the folding down of my own career in favor of my husband's. Over the years I've reflected with surprise on how I ( or we) never even considered the possibility that I might continue working at the New Yorker magazine when my husband was offered a job as a US Foreign Service Officer. I've pondered this when watching my daughter and daughter-in-law conducting themselves and weighing their options. Both have lived in separate countries from their partners on occasion, and pursued their own career ambitions. I admire them for it. Why didn't it occur to me to do the same? Instead, I thought -well, I'm a woman; his career is more important to his self esteem than mine is to me -and me - well, I can have children - I can diversify!
It all worked out in its own way, I guess. I didn't publish as much as I would have liked - as I left my tribe in the writing world to join a different tribe. I learned some languages, traveled and raised my children. Now I'm the age of Joan Castleman in The Wife, and doing my own thing at last. You might say that together with Joe, Joan also has an interesting and rewarding life - but it wasn't one where she got the same recognition or accolades as her husband.
In fact, early in the book she decides that bowing out is the sensible path - when she meets a famous novelist - Elaine Mozell, who takes her on one side and tells her "Don't do it.... Don't think you can get their attention," she tells Joan .".. The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives. Who gets to be King Shit.... I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep the women's voices hushed and tiny and the men's voices loud," she says.
This brings me back to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. She writes about how women writers are marginalized and "confined to the ghetto of popular culture" - and when I read Fear of Flying last month I realized that up until now I had done this to Erica Jong too. She deserved to be considered more seriously than she is. This novel has stood the test of time far far better than, say, John Updike, whose Rabbit Run I wanted to hurl across the room for its misogyny and self satisfaction.
Meg Wolitzer is funny and insightful when she writes about this particular generation of male writers - the Updike generation. I laughed out loud on several occasions, reading about "Butternut Peak" writer's summer conference - a take on Bread Loaf and "all the narcissism and unpleasantness let loose among the scrub pines." Also the untalented but beautiful Merry Cheslin who Joe has an affair with at the conference. Joan Castleman breaks down in front of some of the other wives over this affair and then wonders why the talentless but beautiful Merry Cheslin got to her so much. She asks herself, "what if talent wasn't simply meaningless. But was actually a liability? Did he like her more because she was a bad writer? Did it make him feel safe sliding along the body of a woman who would never be a great challenge to him? Yes, it did." I guess this would be the kind of occasion where a "wife" is not what you want - even if you may need one. You want to be seen as a self-made man - not as one edited and shaped by a wife who knows all your flaws and foibles!
There's so much incidental observation that resonates in this novel: Joan's envy of the woman who lives alone in a manless world and runs a book club; her take on the would-be biographer of Joe Castleman - Nathaniel Bone, a sort of Rick Moody type whose real subject is "not Joe's short story at all but Nathaniel Bone's intelligence"; about the successful feminist and new kind of woman writer Valerian Qaanaag, "Better to stay among the dinosaurs like Joe and Lev and the others," Joan Castleman feels ."Better to be miserable and feel cheated than to welcome this new breed that I didn't understand and for whom I had no affection."
And what about how Joan's daughters had their father's love but not his attention - "which was something else entirely"; about their son David and his troubles, and how this son absorbed on a visceral level all that was wrong in his parents' marriage and was gas-lighted because of it. So so good. Written with such a light touch, but oh so deep and insightful.
#megwolitzerwife #editorwife
No comments:
Post a Comment