The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

 I just picked this one off the shelf in a library branch in Queens. It is my first Wolitzer. Actually I had her confused with someone else (Elizabeth Wurtzel).

This is a rather fine novel of a marriage. It tracks through the entire relationship in a full, deep and brisk 219 pages. Deep? It feels like she has basically told the whole story of this marriage. The novel is written from the wife’s point of view. She, Joan, and Joe, the husband, are heading to Helsinki where he has been awarded a prize for his body of work as a now aging novelist. He has been very successful. Success in the way that novelists, through maybe the 1960s, were in the USA. Big stars. Not so now. Most can’t sell enough to make a living and augment that by teaching.
At the beginning of their relationship, he is a married Smith professor of creative writing and she is a student. He has not been published yet, except for a short story in a small literature magazine. She reads it and doesn’t like it but doesn’t let on.

They end up together. He abandons wife, a very young daughter, and his job as they run off to NYC together.
The wife tells us of their early 1950s days in Greenwich Village with the other writers. A lot of the focus is of the sexual break down, the women’s roles is this and the men’s is that. The wives take care of the husbands who are more or less needy babies.
She goes through the 1960s feminist wave and shows a simmering resentment that has built up over a life of service. She was a writer when at Smith and her work was very good, but she gave it up for Joe. Took care of the babies for Joe. She was the good wife in many ways and the resentment she shows in her 64 year old voice is completely understandable and clear. Except hubby, a bit older and the king of the world as this great novelist doesn’t see it. He doesn’t want to see it. He would have to deal with it if he let himself see it.
In the surprising wrap up of the story we all find out why.

The novel has a lot to say about these old school, post agricultural marriages. With their strict double standard of rules and roles. This has been changing some for people younger than those characters in the novel. Are these marriages better, more equitable? Maybe, or maybe they are just shorter and people walk away from a structure that is not working. Perhaps that is more of the cause of our trouble in relationships. The structure just doesn’t fit what people want. Is it that the men have not absorbed the social changes implied with feminism as some of the women surely have? Or is it that once we are in these relationships there is a tendency to fall back on the way it always was in our parent’s generation, those that came before them?

This is a terrific story of a marriage and it is very well performed by Meg Wolitzer’s fine writing.
One would hope a reader would put this down and wonder if either of these marriage roles is right for them.

Marwencol (2010)

Directed by Jeff Malmberg

This is a documentary about the work of Mark Hogancamp. He lives in Kingston, NY, one of those old milltowns up the river from NYC. He lives in a permanently fixed prefab trailer type home.
He makes detailed WWII type scenes with dolls in the yard outside his trailer. He does this to deal with his loneliness, which might have always been a part of his life, but is now much worse because of brain damage and emotional trauma he suffered after a vicious attack by 5 men outside a Kingston bar. Before this happened he didn’t do that type of work. He shows some old notebooks before drawings. He says he can’t draw anymore.
He works out the trauma of his attack by creating scenarios of the SS dolls attacking and torturing the doll character of himself.

He has an interesting story to tell and does. He is on camera talking a lot throughout the movie.
One might wonder though how this is all done. The documentary doesn't go into any detail. All the dolls have excellent uniforms, they have small rifle replicas, (“This is a BAR.”) even the faces seem more expressive than just Barbie, Ken, or GI Joe dolls, but maybe that is a projection of a viewer seeing them in the settings with full costumes and movie still placement setups for the photos he takes.
Where did the costumes come from? Is he making them himself? Where does he buy all this stuff?
Nevertheless it’s an interesting film. In the hate filled USA, he survived and made something of himself with reasons to go on. Good for him. 

There is a feature film with Steve Carell playing Mark Hogancamp. Mediaglut has not seen this, just the documentary, and probably won’t bother watching it either.

The Tender Bar (2021)

 Tye Sheridan is having a fine year in a very successful career. He is also in Paul Schrader’s very fine drama about the trauma of war;The Card Counter.

In this one he is the main character in a young man’s coming of age story set roughly in the last 30 years of the 20th Century. The 70s and 80s in the movie feel remote, long ago. Was it really that long ago? Part of that could be the Long Island setting. Perhaps there, in comparison to NYC, the suburban lifestyle is very concerned with a type of traditional notions about what a man is and what a woman is and what they can expect from one another. Part of this view of life is that all a young man needs to get through it all is to have another older male mentor to tell him what is what. In this JR is fortunate that he has a middle-aged uncle interested in his well being after JR and his abandoned mother, dad being mostly his DJ voice on the radio, moves into the crowded Manhasset home of the patriarch grandfather and extended family. 
Fortunately the uncle is more than a suburban bar owner and bartender. His mentoring is spot on for the lucky boy. The guy is a bookish autodidact with a closet (!) full of books, “Wanna be a writer? Read all these!”  
He eventually meets daddy with very disappointing results.
Will grow and blossom in spite of his alcohol saturated roots.
George Clooney directed this adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s memoir.
See it on Amazon Prime.