I don’t often make or take time to read fiction. Not because I don’t like it, quite the contrary. I do like it, but it’s not work, and being something of a workaholic, time allocations for “reading for pleasure” are sparse. Most often I indulge when travelling. Last week I mentioned The Time Traveler’s Wife. I read about a third of it and enjoyed the writing, but was bored. I never felt compelled to ask “and then what happened?” If you are a long-time DevraDoWrite reader you may be shocked, as I have written that once started, I found it hard to not force myself to finish a book — that was then, I seem to have surmounted that difficulty now.
For my plane ride home I started reading The Wife by Meg Wolitzer. Here’s the opening:
The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-give thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything now? Here we were in first-class splendor, tentatively separated from anxiety; there was no turbulence and the sky was bright, and somewhere among us, possibly, sat an air marshal in dull traveler’s disguise, perhaps picking at a little dish of oily nuts or captivated by the zombie prose of the in-flight magazine. Drinks had already been served before takeoff, and we were both frankly bombed, our mouths half open, our heads tipped back. Women in uniform carried baskets up and down the aisles like a sexualized fleet of Red Riding Hoods.
“Will you have some cookies, Mr. Castleman? a brunette asked him, leaning over with a pair of tongs, and as her breasts slid forward and then withdrew, I could see the ancient mechanism of arousal start to whir like a knife sharpener inside him, a sight I’ve witnessed thousands of times over all these decades. “Mrs Castleman?” the woman asked me then, in afterthought, but I declined. I didn’t want her cookies, or anything else.
We were on our way to the end of the marriage…
Publishers Weekly said “A tale of witty disillusionment…a devestating message about the price of love and fame.” And a blurb from Katha Pollitt says “…witty, deft, hilarious sentences that add up to so much tragic understanding of life…”
According the the back cover copy, Mr. Castleman “is one of America’s preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award” and Mrs. Castleman “who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop.” I’m likely to finish reading this one. It’s a slender volume, won’t take up too much time…