2020 was a memorable reading year for me; not least of all because I discovered four new authors. That is to say, I finally read four authors who have been around for many years (two of them are now dead). I catch on slowly, but I do catch on.
The four authors are Hilary Mantel, Helene Hanff, P.D. James, and Meg Wolitzer. I list them in order of preference. And don’t read anything into fourth place for Meg Wolitzer. She’s pretty great, and she’d be first on lots of other lists. But this is a high-octane group, and someone had to come last. Anyway, this post is about Wolitzer. I read three of her books in 2020: This is My Life, The Wife, and The Interestings.
*****
I read This is My Life sometime during the summer, and I was sure that I'd written about it. And I did actually write about it, but I never published that post. I just read it over and realized that it was kind of half-baked, which makes it exactly like everything else I ever write, so here you are.
As I read This is My Life, I wondered to myself how I, a middle-aged suburban American woman, had managed to live as long as I had without reading a single Meg Wolitzer novel. This one came up as a Kindle recommendation, probably because of the Nora Ephron connection. Kindle knows how I feel about Nora Ephron One of Nora’s first movies was an adaptation of This is My Life, which was originally published as This is Your Life. Meg Wolitzer apparently re-released her novel as This is My Life, because people tend to do what Nora tells them to do. Nora has been dead since 2012, but she's still the boss.
I remember seeing a TV review of "This is My Life" (the movie) when it was first released. I don’t remember if the review was part of a movie review show or maybe an entertainment segment of a news show, but I do remember that the snide male critic did not like the movie. I don’t remember the substance of his criticism, the reasons why he didn’t like the movie. I just remember that when discussing the cast and their recent credits, he dismissively referred to the movie’s star, Julie Kavner, as “Julie Kavner, of nothing in particular.” I wasn’t listening to him in the first place but if I had been, he’d have lost me right there, because Julie Kavner, of course, was Rhoda’s sister, and that is a long way away from being “nothing in particular.” And you know what else? I don’t remember the critic’s name, nor the name of the silly inconsequential show that foolishly broadcast his stupid opinions. I know who Julie Kavner is, but that critic was just some guy, from “nothing in particular.” He will remain anonymous here; not least of all because I don't know his name.
Anyway, back to the book, which I loved. This is My Life is a deceptively simple and unpretentious story of a single mother and her two daughters, who are young girls when the story begins and young women when it ends. The point of view transitions back and forth between Opal and Erica Engels, daughters of Dottie Engels, a hugely successful stand-up comic whose broad, self-mocking fat lady humor is enormously popular in the 1970s, and then becomes all of a sudden quaint and unsophisticated and old-fashioned in the 1980s. Dottie doesn’t understand the cultural shift that suddenly renders her irrelevant. She doesn’t understand the new young comedians on “Rush Hour,” the SNL-like late-night show where Opal becomes an unpaid intern; and when her agent can no longer book her to perform on stage or on television, she becomes the TV spokesperson for a new line of mass market fashion for larger women.
Dottie is a larger-than-life figure, and the reader learns about her almost exclusively through Erica and Opal, who each try in their own way to separate themselves from Dottie and forge their own identities. But they can't. They can't be who they are supposed to be without acknowledging their mother's DNA, her role in shaping their personalities and their destinies. As hard as they try to get away, they return to Dottie again and again, in their thoughts and in front of their television sets when Dottie’s commercials begin to appear; and then finally in person, when Dottie suffers a heart attack.
This is Your Life was published in 1992, just long enough after the 70s ended and the 80s began that Wolitzer could convey the dramatic shift in the tone of popular culture between about 1975 and 1984 with the benefit of distant hindsight. The character of Dottie Engels was probably inspired by Phyllis Diller or maybe Joan Rivers or Rose Marie or maybe a combination of all three. In 1975, the world still thought that Phyllis Diller was funny; in 1984, she was a shlocky relic of the past. Phyllis Diller didn’t change, though. Audiences changed and critics’ ideas of what was good and bad and funny and unfunny and relevant and irrelevant changed, leaving comedians like Phyllis Diller and Rose Marie and the fictional Dottie on the dust heap of pop culture history. Things change slowly, over many years; until something accelerates that change and makes it seem very sudden. That's how I read it, anyway.
I never saw the movie version, but I intend to remedy this. I'll report back
The Interestings (a great title) was one of the last books I read in 2020. When I read This is My Life, one of the first things I thought is that Meg Wolitzer tells a story by just telling it, right from the very beginning. The Interestings is both similar to and different from This is My Life. It’s similar because the main characters’ personalities and voices are clear right away, almost from page one. It’s different because the story develops a bit more slowly. But just when you begin to wonder if anything is going to happen to these characters, things start to happen.
The Interestings are a group of talented, mostly privileged summer camp friends. The novel follows them from their teenage summers at an exclusive arts camp in the Berkshires through middle adulthood, so it takes place over a long period of time. And it also reads as though it was written over a long period of time, like maybe Meg Wolizer stopped and started and forgot some plot details when she picked up the manuscript again. There were some tiny holes, some minor inconsistencies here and there. Dates and times and “wait a minute, how did we get here from over there?” kinds of inconsistencies. And then there are one or two times when Wolitzer explains away a contradiction, as if to tell the reader “Oh, I meant for that to happen; that little missing link was intentional.” But it’s a very good and compelling story. I missed the characters when it was all over.
*****
I read The Wife in between This is My Life and The Interestings, because I loved This is My Life and I wanted more Wolitzer. I liked The Wife much less than This is My Life, but not so much that it put me off Wolitzer for good. The Wife is a rather bitter story, as of course it would be (no spoilers but if you read it you’ll understand what I mean) but that’s not why I didn’t like it. Humanity is bitter sometimes, and novelists are supposed to tell the truth about humanity.
In The Wife, a woman who is married to a famous author spends most of her life supporting his illustrious literary career and ambitions. The book has a big twist at the end, and I still feel stupid for not having seen it coming, because Wolitzer drops pretty broad hints throughout, pretty much from the first page. So maybe my annoyance with myself colored my judgement of this book. But I don’t think that’s it, either. I think it’s just not as good as This is My Life and The Interestings. And that’s why I don’t really think of these little book notes as reviews, because I don’t really have much more to say than “I really liked this book” or “I didn’t like this book very much.”
Or maybe I do. Back to The Wife. There’s a streak of meanness in the book; but this also doesn’t completely account for my overall negative feeling about it. Meanness alone is not a bad thing, from a literary perspective. Again, novelists are supposed to tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is as mean as a snake sometimes. And I don’t find it necessary to like a character, even a main character, in order to like a book. But I do need to feel that I know how the author feels about that character, and I couldn’t really tell how Meg Wolitzer felt about Joan Castleman. I haven’t seen the movie yet. I might watch it, just to see if it’s one of those rare cases in which the movie is better than the book. I suspect that it will be.
Now that I think about it, I still don’t necessarily like The Wife; not in the sense of enjoying reading it and missing the characters when I leave them. But it has something important to say about the importance of truth, and the corrosive nature of lies; how perpetrating and living with a lie can damage a person or a family.
Or a whole country.
But I digress.
Anyway, two (let’s say two and a half) out of three is good enough for me, and my 2021 to-read list includes several more Meg Wolitzer novels. I’ll read them, and write about them. Eventually.
*****
Note: This year, I'm going to try to do a better job writing about books as I read them, rather than all at once a year later. Not only is it hard to remember details many months after you read a book, but when you're writing about several books in one post, you have to italicize titles multiple times. This is no small effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment