The Wife
Meg Wolitzer, 2003
Simon & Schuster
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483547
Summary
"The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage."
So opens Meg Wolitzer's compelling and provocative novel The Wife, as Joan Castleman sits beside her husband on their flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband, Joseph Castleman, is "one of those men who own the world...who has no idea how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derives much of his style from the Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette." He is also one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award to honor his accomplishments, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.
From this gripping opening, Wolitzer flashes back fifty years to 1950s Smith College and Greenwich Village — the beginning of the Castleman relationship — and follows the course of the famous marriage that has brought them to this breaking point, culminating in a shocking ending that outs a carefully kept secret.
Wolitzer's most important and ambitious book to date, The Wife is a wise, sharp-eyed, compulsively readable story about a woman forced to confront the sacrifices she's made in order to achieve the life she thought she wanted. But it's also an unusually candid look at the choices all men and women make for themselves, in marriage, work, and life. With her skillful storytelling and pitch-perfect observations, Wolitzer invites intriguing questions about the nature of partnership and the precarious position of an ambitious woman in a man's world. (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
Here are three words that land with a thunk: "gender," "writing" and "identity." Yet in The Wife, Meg Wolitzer has fashioned a light-stepping, streamlined novel from just these dolorous, bitter-sounding themes. Maybe that's because she's set them all smoldering: rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer's hands, rage is also very funny.... As a portrait of deception, this small, intelligently made novel rivals "The Dangerous Husband," by Jane Shapiro, and John Lanchester's "Debt to Pleasure."... But if The Wife is a puzzle and an entertainment, it is also a near-heartbreaking document of feminist realpolitik.
Claire Dederer - New York Times Book Review
To say that The Wife is Wolitzer's most ambitious novel to date is an understatement. This important book introduces another side of a writer we thought we knew: Never before has she written so feverishly, so courageously. It almost becomes possible to imagine a female Philip Roth: The keen intelligence, rage, neurosis and humor are certainly equal to his, but this is not to say the book is derivative. Hers is a wholly original voice, as she tells the story not only of a marriage built on uneven compromises, but also of a woman's poignant self-discovery. Readers born after 1970 may not appreciate what motivates Joan Castleman, but it is crucial to know this woman — many of us already do and don't even realize it.
Kera Bolonik - Washington Post
Meg Wolitzer has ripened into a chanteuse of a writer, a Dietrich of fiction; her smoky humor, her languid look at life, her breathless sentences are all let loose a little more than usual in The Wife. Joan is 64, married to a literary lion, Joe Castleman, one of the big men in the world who "derived much of his style from 'The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.' " They are on their way to Helsinki where he will receive the prestigious Helsinki Prize, $525,000, awarded to a writer, one step down from the Nobel. This is as far as Joan will climb with him, though he does not yet know it. While their three children have grown in various states of contortion around his ego and their marriage, she is the real writer in the marriage, and she has borne him all the way: his affairs, successes, setbacks with a grace that is the envy of their friends and acquaintances. But now she's done. Not mad, just ready to have her own life.
It has by no means been a life of quiet suffering. It was a life she chose as a young student at Smith College, a promising writer in her own right, who fell in love with her professor, Castleman, and seduced him knowingly, so that he was eventually forced to leave his wife and baby daughter. She became the "alpha wife" at literary conferences and parties, and she enjoys it with a kind of Mrs. Ramsey–like artfulness.
Various literary women make an impression on her and haunt her decisions: "Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers.… If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers." Wolitzer's world is John Updike's world, but her writing is at once grittier and bigger. It's hard to tell how old she is because she writes with so little bitterness. I hope that The Wife might appeal to both men and women. It is as much about the male psyche as it is about the woman's.
Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times
Wolitzer opens her latest tale in the first-class cabin of an airplane. Joan, a still-striking 64-year-old woman, observes her husband, the "short, wound-up, slack-bellied" famous novelist Joe Castleman, as he lolls in his seat and accepts the treats and attention offered him by the flight attendants. The couple are on their way to Finland, where Joe will receive the fictional Helsinki Prize, not quite as prestigious as the Nobel, but worth a small fortune-the crown jewel in a spectacular career. Yet as the once blonde Smith College co-ed looks over at the once handsome creative writing teacher who seduced her, she realizes that she must end this marriage. The reader is prepared for a tale of witty disillusionment. Here is Joan on the literary fame game: "You might even envy us-him for all the power vacuum-packed within his bulky, shopworn body, and me for my twenty-four-hour-access to it, as though a famous and brilliant writer-husband is a convenience store for his wife, a place she can dip into anytime for a Big Gulp of astonishing intellect and wit and excitement." As the narrative flows from the glamorous present back to the past, tracing the bohemian Greenwich Village beginnings of the couple's relationship and Joe's skyrocketing success and compulsive philandering, an almost subliminal psychological horror tale begins to unfold. Wolitzer delicately chips away at this seemingly confident and detached narrator and her swaggering "genius" husband, inserting a sly clue here and there, until the extent of Joan's sacrifice is made clear. There is no cheap, gratifying Hollywood ending to make it all better. Instead, Wolitzer's crisp pacing and dry wit carry us headlong into a devastating message about the price of love and fame. If it's a story we've heard before, the tale is as resonant as ever in Wolitzer's hands.
Publishers Weekly
Joan Castelman is en route to Finland to watch her husband, renowned author Joe Castleman, win the Helsinki Prize when she decides to leave him. What follows is Joan's fascinating recollection of their marriage, his career, and her fading dreams. Telling her story in alternating segments, she starts in the 1950s with the beginning of the couple's professor-student relationship and continues through to the present, their 40 years of marriage stacking up the unspoken regrets that lead to Helsinki. This is Wolitzer's sixth novel (following Surrender, Dorothy ), and she's as sharp as ever. Her funny yet harshly bitter book features amazingly crafted prose, and the story of what Joan sacrifices to support her husband and his illustrious career is just as astounding. Complete with a staggering twist ending, this is not one to miss. For most fiction collections. —Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC
Library Journal
Forty-five years of a bad marriage laid out in pat detail, by the author, most recently, of Surrender Dorothy (1999). On the way to Helsinki, where her novelist husband Joe is to receive a major literary award, 64-year-old Joan Castleman relives their years together as she steels herself to tell Joe she’s leaving him. They met during her freshman year at Smith, where he was her English professor. All the girls were smitten by the young, darkly handsome Jew whose wife had just had his baby, but Joan was the one he noticed, both for her blond beauty (and impeccable debutante WASP credentials) and for her natural writing talent. Soon they began a torrid affair, dampened only slightly when she read a less than brilliant story he’d published. After his wife throws Joe out, Joan happily drops out of college to set up house with him in Greenwich Village, where she works as an editorial assistant to support them while he writes his first novel. The book, based on their affair, is a hit, launching his career. Having lost touch with his child from his first wife, Joe has been a less than involved father to the three he’s had with Joan: two daughters, one whose gayness seems completely gratuitous, and an emotionally troubled son who threatened his father one night (the vague, pulled-punches quality of that scene typifying the story as a whole). While Joe has always given Joan credit for helping him with his work, he’s also had frequent dalliances with other women (and, if Joan’s brittle narration is any clue, it might seem hard to blame him). Eventually, Joan drops the bomb: just as her kids always suspected, she wrote the books for which Joe took credit. After his fatal coronary, will she keep her secret to preserve his reputation? Connect-the-dots predictable except for those occasional tasty morsels of nastiness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After attempting her first short story in the library stacks at Smith College, Joan, the protagonist of The Wife, imagines "what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see." Explain how this observation could also be made of wives. What does Joan see even when other people think her eyes are closed?
2. In Chapter Two, Joan meets the writer Elaine Mozell who warns Joan against trying to get the attention of the literary men's club. How might Joan's life have been different without Elaine's discouraging advice haunting her?
3. On a trip to Vietnam with Joe, Joan finds herself on an airstrip, in a segregated clump, with the wives. But Lee, the famous female journalist, chats with the men. Joan laments to herself "I shouldn't be here! I wanted to cry. I'm not like the rest of them!" How is Joan different from the rest of the wives who appear throughout the novel? In what ways is she similar?
4. Joe's friend, Harry Jacklin, praises Joe's work, telling him, "You've got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women" s. Indeed, we discover that Joe's "sensitivity" is primarily thanks to his wife. How do you think Joan would have been received in the literary world if her name had been attached to the same material? Do you think she would have been as successful?
5. After Joe receives the call confirming he has won the Helsinki Prize, Joan envisions the days ahead, realizing that "I wasn't going to handle this well; it would inflame me with the worst kind of envy." Discuss envy, regret and loss with respect to Joan's choices regarding her writing career.
6. Over the years, many people come to admire Joan for her steely resolve in the face of blatant betrayal and infidelity. Is Joan, in fact, an admirable character? Why do you think Joan waits so long to decide to leave Joe?
7. There is a lot of talk from the women about "The Men." Specifically, Joan describes Joe as "one of those men who own the world," and Elaine Mozell harbors contempt for the men who conspire to "keep the women's voices hushed and tiny...." What is your opinion of Joe and the men he represents? Considering that the reader sees him through the eyes of his wife, do you think he is presented fairly?
8. On being a wife, Joan admits: "I liked the role at first, assessed the power it contained, which for some reason many people don't see, but it's there." Discuss the quiet power of wives, particularly during the late fifties when Joan is initiated into wifehood. Do you think the power wives wield is more visible today?
9. Towards the end of the novel, Joan reveals the secret that she and Joe long shared about his career. Joan acknowledges that, among others, her "children, each in their own separate ways, had suspicions." As a reader, are you surprised by Joan's revelation or does Joe's sudden merit as a writer seem suspect? What clues support your hunch?
10. At one point their children David and Alice go so far as to confront both Joan and Joe about their secret. Do you think the children are convinced by Joan's staunch denial? If Joan were your mother, would you be disappointed or proud of her?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page