Glass People by Gail Godwin

    I’m alway reading a book. It’s a bit of a habit. I’m not about to claim that it is some lofty habit or more wholesome than others, but to me it is a form of entertainment that is generally, almost always, a deeper consumption experience than some others, such as moving pictures. Due to this habit, a certain feeling of immediacy comes over me when I finish a book and I want another ASAP. Some things I plan to read, others are picked up as they come my way.

  Last week I was on the way to work and had time for a book exchange at the big new public library of 42nd St and 5th Ave. Sometimes I know what I want and where it is. This time I just grabbed Glass People on the shelf. The thoughts into this>browse fiction>want to read something by a woman (I like to mix it up)>Hmmm?!?Gail Godwin>heard name, never read>this one is paperback>thin 200 pages>I’ll just read this.
 
  Glass People was published in 1972, 50 years ago. With focus on the woman partner, It tells the story of the early days of a marriage. Francesca is a pampered beautiful young wife of an ambitious city prosecutor who is running for state attorney general.     

About a third of the way in Godwin delivers this little character study of the husband:

“He sat eating his breakfast, sipping the freshly ground

coffee, wiping his lips with a napkin, thinking. He was not

a villain, no. Unless your definition of a villain was that of

a person who spent his whole life being disappointed in

people. Whose fault was it if people entered his life disguised
as more than they were and, once inside, flung of

their masks with relief and revealed their paltry selves?

They then blamed him for not approving of them any

more. They called him "inhuman, "unable to love, "'sadis-

tic. By human they usually meant mixed up, a mess of

unthought-out reactions. By love they usually meant need

or fear. And his sadism was simply a matter of letting

them stew in their own juice while he looked on, arms

folded over his chest, a curious wonderment in his eyes

that they could not see, could not really see, that they

had jumped into their dreary mess all by themselves.

   Your standards are too rigid, Cameron, acquaintances

had said to him for years.

   But I don't ask anything of anyone that I wouldn't ask

of myself twice over, he would reply, meaning it. He knew

he had more will, more energy, more patience to wait for

what he wanted, more intelligence than most people.”

  Apparently the husband is not troubled with doubt and its companion self consciousness. He is kept remote and mysterious in the story. There is the above which gives the most insight, beyond that we only see him through his actions and how they affect Francesca. He is presented as one who is unruffled by his wife’s ennui in the new marriage. He is entitled to propose a cure. He suggests that she travel across the country to see her mother.
  This happens and she is off to see mom who is with a new man, her third and gone, sort of, back to the land under his influence.
  On the way home she meets a man who influences her more. Now that I’m writing about it it becomes clear that the book has this gender power dynamic going on. She is influenced by her powerful husband, her mom has changed because of this new man and Francesca is following the notions of the man she met who represents himself as a helper, when he might just be placing her where she is accessible to him.

  This novel is very 1972. The novel is influenced by what has been called Second Wave Feminism, roughly the 1960- 70. It is not at all preachy or agitprop. It is questioning the patriarchy by showing it to us in the story. The characters are all trapped in it. Francesca is on a journey to remedy her discontent with her life.
There is a resolution, but since she is still very young, the reader can imagine a future when she will be fed up enough to get out into SOMETHING ELSE. She was just not ready yet, she doesn’t have to change. And besides, the 1972 culture might not be ready yet either.

  Oddly there is a familiarity about this novel. It is somewhat like Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell.That is also a story of rebellion from an unpleasant situation with little control. In that the main character wants to be free of his work, to be a poet and live for art. He leaves his job writing advertisement copy to do this but soon finds himself in another form of misery; a life of poverty. His life spins out with worry and scarcity.
  Both these novels are too realistic to give us that fantasy happy breaking away of a newly autonomous contented individual. They both end in the same fashion. The stakes were not high enough for either of these protagonists to follow though. They are middle class people accustomed to the shelter of that bubble. It's easier to go back to what was known, available, and good enough in its way.    

Glass People is a successful novel in that it artfully shows a true moment. I like books like this. There are too many heroic or anti-heroic stories, melodramas, influencing us. This is down to earth, low key, and real.    

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.