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.