The Ten-Year Nap
Today’s book is The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer. I’m reviewing it as part of a MotherTalk blog book tour.
The book follows the lives of four stay-at-home mothers who have been friends for years, at a point when they’re sort of re-examining their lives and wondering what happens next. The book is mostly set in Manhattan, with a nod to a neighboring suburb, and the characters are all the sort of upper-middle class professionals whose life choices wind up as long articles in the New York Times. But Wolitzer isn’t of this milieu herself, and the book isn’t full of the brand name references that many such books drop in order to establish their accuracy — when brands are mentioned, they’re generally made-up (I think). She’s less interested in capturing the precise details of the lifestyle than in exploring what drives people to make the choices they do.
I disliked the start of the book: "All around the country, the women were waking up. Their alarm clocks bleated one by one, making soothing sounds or grating sounds or the stirrings of a favorite song…" The move from "the women" to a subset of women — those who don’t have to go to work, who aren’t already sitting bleary eyed with a nursing infant as the sun rises — jarred me, and made me ready to dislike the book as a whole.
But I actually mostly enjoyed the book. Once Wolitzer settles down to the individual characters and stops talking in generalities, her writing skills shine through. And unlike Rachel Cusk, she seems to have some affection for her characters. While the plot is fairly thin, and overly driven by random external events, I was perfectly happy to spend a few hours in the company of Amy, Karen and Jill. (And Roberta, but in thinking over the book, I can’t remember any of the sections from her perspective…)
I noticed in this interview in the NY Times last week that Wolitzer said "I’m not writing the Big Book o’ Motherhood and Work." I think that’s a bit disingenuous, as the book has a series of short vignettes of other people’s lives that only fit into the book as quick looks into the role that work plays in people’s lives — Amy’s mother discovering feminism and her life’s work as a writer, Nadia Comanici thinking that gymnastics isn’t work at all, someone’s aunt who is an assistant to Margaret Thatcher, feeling like she’s part of something important even as she gets verbally abused, a minor character enjoying the camaraderie and energy of working in a dead end casino job.
At some point in the book one of the characters concludes "work doesn’t make you interesting; interesting work makes you interesting." One of the strengths of the book is that for all that Wolitzer comes down on the side of work (and I think she does), she also recognizes that most jobs aren’t all that exciting and wonderful.
***
There’s an interesting discussion of finding your passion going on in the comments on Ask Moxie‘s post on this book.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I liked the opening paragraphs. I only wished I liked the rest of the book more. I thought the treatment of the characters was shallow. I especially disliked the treatment of the “string theorist” mother and Roberta. She had the motivations and interior lives completely wrong.
Math majors do not recite primes to each other in bed. That is a very weird fantasy of what life is like for us math majors. There is one female string theorist, but she has not reproduced yet to my knowledge. Women who work in physics have a very, very low reproductive rate. We surmise it is because of the culture, but who knows. We will leave that research project for sociologists.