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.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 28. 1959
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1994; Best
American Short Stories, 1999; Pushcart Prize; 1998
• Currently—New York, New York
Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Not surprisingly, Meg served as editor for her junior high and high school literary magazines. She graduated from Brown University in 1981. One year later, she published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the story of three college girls bonded by an unhealthy fascination with suicidal women poets. It marked the beginning of a successful writing career that shows no sign of slacking.
Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. She has explored with wit and sensitivity the dynamics of fractured families (This Is Your Life, The Position); the devastating effects of death (Surrender, Dorothy), the challenges of friendship (Friends for Life), and the prospective minefield of gender, identity, and dashed expectations (Hidden Pictures, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Interestings).
In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Skidmore College.
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• First of all, I am obsessed with playing Scrabble. It relaxes me between fits of writing, and I play online, in a bizarro world of anonymous, competitive players. It's my version of smoking or drinking—a guilty pleasure. The thing is, I love words, anagrams, wordplay, cryptic crossword puzzles, and anything to do with the language.
• I also love children's books, and feel a great deal of nostalgia for some of them from my own childhood (Harriet the Spy and The Phantom Tollbooth among others) as well as from my children's current lives. I have an idea for a kids' book that I might do someday, though right now my writing schedule is full up.
• Humor is very important to me in life and work. I take pleasure from laughing at movies, and crying at books, and sometimes vice versa. I also have recently learned that I like performing. I think that writers shouldn't get up at a reading and give a dull, chant-like reading from their book. They should perform; they should do what they need to do to keep readers really listening. I've lately had the opportunity to do some performing on public radio, as well as singing with a singer I admire, Suzzy Roche, formerly of the Roches, a great group that started in 1979. Being onstage provides a dose of gratification that most writers never get to experience.
• But mostly, writing a powerful novel—whether funny or serious, or of course both—is my primary goal. When I hear that readers have been affected by something I've written, it's a relief. I finally have come to no longer fear that I'm going to have to go to law school someday....
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell—this is the perfect modern novel. Short, concise, moving, and about a character you come to care about, despite her limitations. It reminds me of life. It takes place over a span of time, and it's hilarious, tragic, and always stirring.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
At one point, Michael complains about his mother: "that combination of hypersensitivity and pushiness—what could you do with it?" As an authorial presence, Wolitzer is motherly in the best way: engaged, caring, but never intrusive or judgmental. She may love all of the seven children of her novels equally, but The Position is certainly her richest and most substantial.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post
Neurotic siblings and embarrassing parents are familiar (even required) elements of the literature of suburban nostalgia and malaise. Wolitzer (Surrender, Dorothy; The Wife) doesn't tamper with these basic ingredients in her latest novel, but she gives them a titillating twist. Paul and Roz Mellow are enthusiastically in love-so much so that in 1975 they write a how-to sex book, Pleasuring, that features illustrations of them in every imaginable position. The book becomes a runaway bestseller. When the children find the book and read it together, they're forever traumatized, in ways both serious and comedic. Flash forward 30 years: Paul and Roz are long divorced and remarried, and Paul, in particular, remains bitter; the grown children fumble through their lives on the eve of the publisher's reissue of the sex classic. The oldest, Holly, has settled into late motherhood after a lifetime of nomadic drug-taking; uptight Michael suffers from chronic depression; Dashiell, a gay Log Cabin Republican speechwriter, is diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; and insecure late-bloomer Claudia returns to her Long Island hometown to finally figure out how to be a fully functioning adult. If the characters are rather stock, and the musings on love, sex and family familiar, Wolitzer nevertheless bestows her trademark warmth and light touch on this tale of social and domestic change.
Publishers Weekly
What are the consequences for their children when Paul and Roz Mellow write a Joy of Sex-like guide illustrated with pastel renderings of their own coupling?
Library Journal
In Wolitzer's slyly comic sixth, a couple publishes Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment, with illustrations of the authors in various positions including the gymnastic "Electric Forgiveness," "a wonderful way to achieve climax quickly and lovingly after a scene of anger or stress." Things begin in November 1975 when Roz and Paul Mellow's four children—teenagers Holly and Michael and their siblings Dashiell, eight, and Claudia, six—go through their parents' book together in the family den in suburban Wontauket. Their "orchestra seats for the primal scene" ensure that none of them will be the same. Weaving together the stories of the four and their now-divorced parents, Wolitzer (The Wife, 2003, etc.) covers a wide swath of pop culture, from Claudia's fascination with troll dolls to Dashiell's discovery that he's gay (and Republican), Michael's antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction, and the downward trajectory of Holly, the oldest, who, after decades of drug-taking, emerges miraculously as a still attractive fortysomething nursing mother unwilling to deal with her family except from a distance. The thirtieth anniversary reissue of Pleasuring brings the family back into conflict. Roz, remarried and teaching at Skidmore, is all for it, wanting the attention and the royalties. Paul, retired in Florida with a long-suffering second wife, resists. We learn that Paul was originally Roz's psychoanalyst (he was ousted from the profession) and that Roz left Paul for the illustrator of Pleasuring, who sketched the two for months and then declared his love. While Michael tries to convince his father to go along with the deal, his lover Thea plays Dora in a play based on the Freudian case study and starts an affair with her female costar; Dashiell gets Hodgkin's and needs a stem-cell transplant; and Claudia meets David Gupta, whose parents live in her old house, and begins her first true love affair. Immensely readable, if occasionally flat. Wolitzer is best when she stirs the pot of familial and generational tensions.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why did Paul and Roz Mellow keep a copy of Pleasuring where they knew the children could, and most likely would, find it? Did they fully understand the consequences of how the book might affect their children, especially 6-year-old Claudia and 8-year-old Dashiell?
2. Roz "had once read a line in a book that she'd never forgotten: Women have sex so they can talk, and men talk so they can have sex" (240). Using examples from the story, discuss the different ways in which men and women view sex, relationships, and the ways in which the two intersect.
3. How does looking at the book—and seeing their parents in this way — impact each of the Mellow children? What do their reactions reveal about their individual personalities? When they're re-introduced 28 years later in Chapter 2, is it apparent how the book has affected them even in adulthood?
4. How did growing up on the grounds of a psychiatric institution affect Roz, both physically and emotionally, including the incident with Warren Keyes when she was nine years old?
5. How did Paul and Roz's relationship develop from analyst and patient to lovers? What did they see in one another? What did each one get from the relationship?
6. Why do you suppose the author chose to have Thea starring in a play about Sigmund Freud, the most famous of psychoanalysts, and his patient Dora?
7. Claudia and Michael each take a trip—Michael to Florida to visit his father and Claudia to their hometown of Wontauket. How do these trips turn out different than Claudia and Michael expected? What motivates Claudia to visit her childhood home on Swarthmore Circle?
8. Claudia says to David, "I wanted to do this film because elementary school was a time when I was happy. I didn't mean for it to have all this pathos. But here it is" (183). Making the film gives Claudia a window into the past. What did she expect to find, and what does she actually discover?
9. Holly's road from adolescence to her early forties has brought her to a place where she never envisioned herself — the wife of a wealthy doctor living in an affluent Los Angeles suburb. Why did she marry Marcus? Has having a family of her own brought her closer to her parents and siblings or driven her further away?
11. Until John Sunstein confessed his love to Roz, she had always thought of him as "the artist" or "the man behind the easel." What makes her see him in a different light? How does she decide in those few moments in the bathroom that she returns his feelings? If they had met under more traditional circumstances, would they have fallen in love?
12. What is Paul's reaction when he discovers that Roz is having an affair with John Sunstein? Paul "could never figure out what that quiet, inarticulate artist possessed that he lacked, and he could never accept it" (254). What does Roz find in her relationship with Jack that was lacking in her marriage to Paul?
13. At the dinner party to celebrate the anniversary edition of Pleasuring, the Mellow family, with the exception of Holly, is brought together for the first time in many years. What does this scene reveal about the characters? Does it bring closure to a family that was irrevocably changed because of the very book they're celebrating? Why did Paul change his mind about reissuing Pleasuring?
14. The title of the book refers to a sexual position, called Electric Forgiveness, that Paul and Roz Mellow created. Discuss the instances in the story where the position is mentioned, and its significance, including the concluding scene with Claudia and David. Why do you suppose the author chose The Position as the title?
15. In what ways do early experiences with sex affect people's entire lives, and can you think of some other novels in which children are exposed to the world of adult sexuality?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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