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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Auspicious beginning leads to predictable ending., 8 April 2006
This novel's auspicious opening sentence, combined with other readers' hints of a surprise ending, tantalized me into ordering the book. However, as early as the first chapter I guessed the "secret" underlying the story but kept reading to the end just to see if I was right. Joan Castleman is a disgruntled wife who provides a first person account of her 45 year marriage to Joe, a vain, self-satisfied, unfaithful man who happens to be a very successful author. The story opens with her decision to leave him while they are flying at 35,000 feet in the first class section of an airliner carrying them to Finland. Joe is about to receive the Helsinki Prize, the fictitious equivalent of the Nobel prize for literature. The next 200 pages is a literary autopsy of a defunct marriage. She remembers their decades together that began as an adulterous affair between a married college writing professor and his more talented student. The ensuing scandal caused her to drop out of school; he lost his teaching position, and they fled, nearly penniless to Greenwich Village. Despite Joe's apparent lack of writing talent, after they marry he writes a novel, which is surprisingly well written and becomes a best seller. Over the years more literary sucesses follow, and the accolades make him more insufferable. As his celebrity grows, so does his appetite for other women. He is also a neglectful father. As Joan's resentful memories accumulate, you begin to wonder why this intelligent woman didn't leave him years before. Why did she trade her own writing ambitions to become a wife and mother? Has she really been satisfied basking in his reflected light? Did the women's liberation movement somehow bypass her? When Joe makes his acceptance speech for the Helsinki Prize he acknowledges Joan as his muse,saying "Without her, I am certan that I would not be standing up here tonight. I would instead be at home staring at a blank piece of paper." There's more to that statement than meets the eye, for she is much more than his muse. You come to realize that her apparent complacency over the years is actually complicity. Although the story is darkly humorous, at only 219 pages, it still feels too long. I think it would have had more dramatic impact as a short story.
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by Meg Wolitzer
by Meg Wolitzer
by Anne Tyler
by Elizabeth Strout
