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