The Position
Meg Wolitzer, 2005
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743261807
Summary
Sex, love, the 1970s, and one extraordinary family that lived to tell the tale.
Crackling with intelligence and original humor, The Position is a masterful take on sex and the suburban American family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution and throughout the thirty-year hangover that followed. Meg Wolitzer, the author of the much-acclaimed novel The Wife (named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsday), takes another huge step forward with this new book and showcases her distinctive voice, pitch-perfect observations, electric wit, and depth of emotion.
In 1975, suburban parents Paul and Roz Mellow write a Joy of Sex-type book called Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment, which becomes a surprise runaway bestseller. The Position opens with the four Mellow children, aged six to fifteen, at the moment when they see the mortifying book (and the graphic, pastel illustrations of their parents' creative, vigorous lovemaking) for the very first time — an experience that will forever complicate their ideas about sex, parents, families, and themselves. The book brings a strange celebrity and small fortune ("sex money" the children call it) to the Mellows and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever.
Thirty years later, as the now-dispersed family members argue about whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children as they confront their own struggles with love, work, sex, death, and the indelible early specter of their erotically charged parents.
Some novels are about family, and others are about sex. The Position is about sex within the context of a family. Insightful, witty, panoramic, and heartbreaking, it is a compulsively readable novel about an eternally mystifying subject: how a group of people growing up in one house can become so very different from one another. (From the publisher.)