THE WIFE
By Meg Wolitzer

[This is an excerpt from the original book review, “In the Shadow of the Big Boys.”]

Here are three words that land with a thunk: “gender,” “writing” and “identity.” Yet in “The Wife,” Meg Wolitzer has fashioned a light-stepping, streamlined novel from just these dolorous, bitter-sounding themes. Maybe that’s because she’s set them all smoldering: Rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer’s hands, rage is also very funny.

As the book opens, Joe and Joan Castleman are on a plane to Helsinki, where Joe is to receive a prestigious literary prize. Joan, the narrator, tells us that her husband is “one of those men who own the world” and describes him with a nice mixture of wifely regard and satirical distance: “There are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who loved to consume runny cheeses and whiskey and wine … who derived much of his style from ‘The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.’ “

Image

The story of the Castleman marriage is told in a series of flashbacks. Joan, painfully alive to the hackneyed nature of their match, recalls their early days: “It kills me to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again.” The entire novel, in fact, is a kind of paean to the notion that clichés are clichés because they’re often true. The pathetic thing about the younger version of Joan is not that her story is unique; it’s the fact that there were — and still are — so many Joans, circling like so many budgies.

A promising writer, Joan abandons her own career in the service of her husband’s. Joe, meanwhile, roars through life. He chases other women, drinks vats of booze, torments himself over his literary stature and happily ignores his children. In relating all this, Wolitzer deploys a calm, seamless humor not found in her previous novels. The jokes don’t barge in and tap us on the shoulder as they did in “This Is Your Life” or “Surrender, Dorothy.” Instead, they gradually accumulate, creating a rueful, sardonic atmosphere. “Wives,” Joan tells us in a typical aside, “are the sad sacks of any writers’ conference.” She is just as sharp on Joe’s self-involvement:

“The men who own the world don’t get to do that by being magnanimous and overly interested in other people. They get to do it by taking care of themselves along the way. They stoke the fire of their own reputations, and sometimes other people come by, asking: What’s that you’re doing there?

“Oh, stoking the fire of my reputation.

“Can I help?

“Certainly. Go get some wood.”

Eventually, Joan lets us in on the Castlemans’ secret. And once we know the truth, we want to go back and examine the carapace of justification, blind-eye-turning and bitter regret that is Joan’s history as a wife. The book represents a real step forward for Wolitzer, and its success lies in its reticence. Joan defiantly leaves us wanting more, whereas Wolitzer’s other heroines left us wanting maybe a teensy bit less. As a portrait of deception, this small, intelligently made novel rivals “The Dangerous Husband,” by Jane Shapiro, and John Lanchester’s “Debt to Pleasure.”

But if “The Wife” is a puzzle and an entertainment, it’s also a near heartbreaking document of feminist realpolitik. In the modernist milieu the Castlemans inhabit, to be a woman writer is automatically to be lesser, to produce work faintly praised as “powerful in its own right.” Oh, there are exceptions, notably Mary McCarthy. She appears here as a kind of Lady Writer fetish object that the male writers finger when they want to demonstrate an appreciation of the weaker sex. “But what,” Joan asks, “happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe?” She herself is the answer to this question. The central event of the book is a nonevent: the moment when Joan Castleman gave up her own writing to be a wife.