FEW NOVELISTS HAVE GOT SUCH A detailed grasp of the taxonomy of the modern American urban middle-class, middle-aged female as Meg Wolitzer. Amy Lamb, her protagonist here, is typical of such women – lavishly educated and ruefully self-aware, never
quite at the top of their game, time and success having passed them by (blame their gender, weak ambition, and middling talent). Caught between the second and third waves of feminism, they have created their lives – as daughters do – in opposition to those of their mothers.
All this could make for a dreary soup, except that it's a Wolitzer novel, so it's very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene or artefact with deadeye accuracy. Amy, for example, is exasperated by her son's fondness for science fiction. Noting that the book he has chosen for their bedtime reading has a "crenellated and immodestly faux-filigreed" spine, she mocks its portentous, inanely named characters: "But the Moorchaser, of course, was not a man, he was a Frailkin, and none of his species had ever entered the Zone before."
"What the hell is a Frailkin?" Amy wonders, irritably.
New York, post-9/11, is also a character, displaying a "dented, temporary quality that made it seem even more valuable, in the way that fragility always increases the price of a thing of beauty". Amy and her family live in a "huge, homely rental building", unable to afford to buy their own place. "The rent battered and shook them; it sucked the money away from them each month as if it were stored in the wind tunnel of the lobby."
Amy develops a girl crush, as women often do, on Penny Ramsey, the "tiny, golden-headed" director of a small, urban museum. She's a paragon, with her three handsome children, her hedge-fund-manager husband, her fulfilling job and her perfect babysitter, who deploys the phrase "cruciferous vegetables" with aplomb. Penny, it turns out, is having an affair with Ian, an adorable young British art curator. Soon Amy becomes the audience that supports and fuels their relationship, its drama distracting her from her own existential malaise.
The central question of The Ten-Year Nap – what exactly is the proper role for a post-industrial, post-second-wave-of-feminism woman at midlife? (or, to paraphrase Roberta, "How will you bear the rest of your life?") – is given a medley of answers. Wolitzer has structured her book so the present-day action alternates with chapters from the past – vignettes of Roberta's, Amy's and Jill's mothers and other female role models. The painter Magritte's devoted wife makes a confounding appearance: her role in life was to be her husband's model.
You get what Wolitzer is trying to do (shades of The Hours here), but it can be distracting: so many women! There's the string theorist mother at the elite boys' school Roberta's and Amy's sons attend (maybe Wolitzer just finds the words "string theorist" innately funny, and gets a kick out of typing them?); the divorced anorexic with her death's-head and tiny body; and even a house-husband, about whom Wolitzer writes, "You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed. He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves."
The husbands are, by and large, a saintly lot, working like dogs to support wives set free first from the professional grind and now from the tedium of caring for young children. Amy's husband transgresses in tiny, sad ways: padding himself at night with cookies; cheating, as Amy discovers, on his expense reports.
The denouement of Penny and Ian's fling is jarring and more than a little bizarre, after which Penny retreats into the insulated worlds of her marriage and her class. (Rich people are different.) Amy, Jill and Roberta click back into gear too, in small but nonetheless forward-moving ways. Wolitzer, whose characters can sometimes be almost too tidy – or too much of a type – has given this group a not altogether tidy resolution. Which seems only fair. As Jill says: "This is the ending. It's just not satisfying, that's all."
The full article contains 716 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
