April 2019 Book, The Wife
As the book opens, Joe and Joan Castleman are on a plane to Helsinki, where Joe is to receive a prestigious literary prize. Joan, the narrator, tells us that her husband is “one of those men who own the world” and describes him with a nice mixture of wifely regard and satirical distance. The story of the Castleman marriage is told in a series of flashbacks. Joan, painfully alive to the hackneyed nature of their match, recalls their early days: “It kills me to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again.” The entire novel, in fact, is a kind of paean to the notion that clichés are clichés because they’re often true. The pathetic thing about the younger version of Joan is not that her story is unique; it’s the fact that there were — and still are — so many Joans, circling like so many budgies. A promising writer, Joan abandons her own career