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 in the service of her husband’s. Joe, meanwhile, roars through life. He chases other women, drinks vats of booze, torments himself over his literary stature and happily ignores his children. In relating all this, Wolitzer deploys a calm, seamless humor not found in her previous novels. The jokes gradually accumulate, creating a rueful, sardonic atmosphere. “Wives,” Joan tells us in a typical aside, “are the sad sacks of any writers’ conference.” She is just as sharp on Joe’s self-involvement:

Eventually, Joan lets us in on the Castlemans’ secret. And once we know the truth, we want to go back and examine the carapace of justification, blind-eye-turning and bitter regret that is Joan’s history as a wife.

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