Meg Wolitzer

I had the very great pleasure of meeting Meg Wolitzer at the Iceland Writers Retreat, where she taught an excellent workshop to we starry-eyed writers.
So I knew I liked her personally, but that may or may not translate into loving her writing.
But It did! I so loved this book that I spent an entire summer Saturday reading it, choking from time to time as she so aptly described being married to “a big man”. I wish my mum-in-law was still alive to share this with.
In this book, Wolitzer accurately and succinctly pulls chunks of reality out of her character’s lives, holding them up to view. Anyone who has spent their married life supporting their partner’s career at the expense of their own will immediately relate. There’s pride, but there is also envy, anger, and frustration. The unfairness of being held to promises made while young, while your partner is not...and the heartbreak of the children, abandoned... well, it’s all pretty familiar!

Wolitzer writes with humour and kindness. The woman in this story can find understanding and sympathy for her great man, even as she suffers life with him. The children are sympathetic and knowing. The fellow writers reminded me of the first day at the IWR, all of us jockeying for position!

This is a very true book, in the way only good fiction can be. Highly recommended!… (mais)

I deeply wanted to like this, especially because Jeffrey Eugenides is a big fan, and I am a diehard Eugenides acolyte. For the first 30 pages, I was rapturous about the book. And, to be fair, I felt something at the end. But, in between.

SO MUCH PLOT.

Six young people spend a summer at camp together, and go on to live interconnected but wildly different lives. Some end in tragedy, some in muted success, others somewhere in between. Wollitzer's prose swirls in a chronologically confused but always comprehensible manner from the 1970s to the end of the 2000s. Her characters all inhabit comfortably bourgeois lives (theatre director, psychologist, and so on) and face bourgeois problems with their parents, marriages, and children. It's all reasonable. But...

SO MUCH PLOT.

To be fair, there are lots of people who love plot. They gag for it. The kind of people who devour daytime soap operas or read fantasy novels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm realising as I age that it's not for me. Plot is wonderful. It can be very engaging in, for instance, a classic mystery novel. But I have my threshold, and Wollitzer reached it before chapter 5. The novel rarely breaks for a moment of atmosphere, colour, or nuance. It's all meetings, conversations, and swift life changes.

Look, it is not a reviewer's job to disagree with what an author chose to do. It's to assess whether they did it successfully. And my problem with the torrential cascades of plot is simply that it deprives us of the most basic of literary adages: "show, don't tell". That's not always good advice, but here it may have been. A fortysomething man who was a stud in his teens has lost his charisma, but doesn't realise it. How do we know? Because the narrative voice tells us. And fair enough, too; there's no time for us to realise it from character or situation, because any given scene only takes one or two pages. There's too much plot, and not enough time. Characters fall in love, fall apart, have depressive episodes, deal with children with disabilities or other crises, soar to the height of their career unexpectedly, change jobs, lament their past life, unintentionally cause divorces, commit alleged rape, are weirdly groomed by older musicians, discover themselves, doubt themselves. Veering between timelines is a clever technique, but it just contributes to Wollitzer's need to keep updating us with chronologies and details that leave us panting with exhaustion. In other words:

SO MUCH PLOT.

Conversely, despite this being a chunky book with lots of plot, dialogue rarely packs a punch. Conversations are functional, people speak just like the rest of us do, and concerns are rarely elevated to literary levels. War and Peace it ain't. Moreso, there's an argument to be made that aside from Jules, the central character, no-one really changes that much. They remain types, and we never dig down.

While I felt an indescribable angst while reading the final chapter, in which unsurprisingly Jules meditates on life, loss, age, and change, I'm not even sure it was because of the author. It was just that inevitable yearning that we all feel when confronted with thoughts of our own past and that endless question of what we have gained with age, but what we have lost. It was empathy by default that I was feeling.

I continue to wish that I could have appreciated this more.… (mais)

To Night Owl from Dogfish is an epistolary novel, written mainly in email and text messages, but some real letters too.

The two main leads (Bett and Avery) are 12-year old girls, one living in NYC, one in CA. They each have a single gay dad and their dads' relationship throws the girls together, reluctantly, with unexpected results.

I listened to the audiobook and the narrators were great!
My only criticism was of the reading of the email messages when there were TONS of replies to the same thread. The narrators read out EVERY single "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:". It had me praying for a change in the Subject line! If I had read the novel, I would have just skipped reading all of those "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:"s. I wish there was a vocal equivalent to that skip:-)… (mais)