Read in October 2013
The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer
Three stars
The Wife is Joan Castleman, whose husband, Joseph, is one of the big American novelists of the post-World War II vintage: an Updike, a Bellow, or a Roth. And Joseph lives up to all of the stereotypes of big American male writers: he drinks too much, he philanders whenever possible, he’s jealous of other writers, he bullies his kids (the ones he doesn’t abandon), and he’s self-centered to the nth degree. In the novel’s opening line, as the couple fly toward Finland where he will pick up a Nobel-like prize, Joan decides she’s finally had enough and will leave him when they get back to the States. As the week-long visit to Finland progresses, Wolitzer traces the history of the Castleman marriage in flashbacks: their meeting at Smith when she was a coed and he was her young married professor, their early years in New York City when she worked in publishing and helped him get published, the years of his success told through snapshot scenes that illustrate the drinking, the philandering, the jealousy, the bullying, etc. Joan is an engaging and witty narrator, and Wolitzer keeps her story zipping along, but many readers will wonder, as I did, why Joan puts up with Joseph for so long when she’s clearly unhappy? SPOILER ALERT: Despite plenty of hints, the answer came as a surprise to me, too much of a surprise, and for me that points to a problem of characterization. Way back when, Joan came to Joseph’s attention because she wrote a good story in his fiction class. A bit later, at a visiting writer soiree at Smith, Joan thinks that the visiting woman writer writes like a man, the way she’d like to write. However, at no point in this early stage of their relationship did I get the impression that Joan had either the drive or the talent to be a great novelist. So the fact that she wrote Joseph’s novels came as a surprise and not in a good way. The fact of Joan’s authorship raises a whole bunch of other questions: Why is Joan content in the end to keep Joseph’s secret, and why in the beginning did she agree to let him put his name on her novels? Although The Wife was published in 2003, the plot has a ripped from the headlines feel in 2013 given the ongoing argument over whether writers who are women are relegated to a lesser class, particularly by critics and in reviews. Perhaps Wolitzer’s novel was actually the first salvo in that argument. She’s a good writer, some of whose other books I’ve really enjoyed, but that flaw in the characterization of Joan ultimately left me unsatisfied at the novel’s end.
The Double, by George Pelecanos
One star
A couple of years ago I mostly gave up reading PI mysteries because so few of them transcended the formula, but I’d heard so much praise for George Pelecanos that I decided to give him a try. What a mistake! This novel is a grotesque caricature of the formula, with the usual elements taken to cartoonish extremes. The violence is straight from video games and about as believable as what’s found on your Xbox. In the real world, lethal vigilantes generally wind up behind bars. The sex is straight out of a lad-magazine fantasy. In the real world, brutal men rarely turn out to be sensitive and sought-after lovers, and highly accomplished women don’t need to troll cocktail lounges for partners because they already know scads of highly accomplished men who are great lovers. I gave Pelecanos a try, and he won’t get another.