Meg Wolitzer brings her characteristic wit and intelligence to a provocative story about the evolution of a marriage, the nature of partnership, the question of a male or female sensibility, and the place for an ambitious woman in a man's world.
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband Joseph is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop. From this gripping opening, Meg Wolitzer flashes back to Smith College and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and follows the course of the marriage that has brought the couple to this breaking pointâ??one that results in a shocking revelation.
With her skillful storytelling and pitch-perfect observations, Wolitzer has crafted a wise and candid look at the choices all men and women makeâ??in marriage, work, and life… (más)
The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusions of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything right now?
As a rule, the men who own the world are hyperactively sexual, though not necessarily with their wives.
All first wives are crazy-- violently and eye-rollingly so
Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life. But it's their choice... They make a choice to be that kind of wife, that kind of mother. Nobody forces them anymore; that's all over now. We had a women's movement in America, we had Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem... We're in a whole new world now. Women are powerful. Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend; they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites pricking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. 'Listen,' we say. 'Everything will be okay.' And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.
'Ah, a Sarah Lawrence girl,' he said with pleasure, deciding at that moment she was a highly creative type, her hands damp with both acrylic paint from art class and ambrosia from some middle-of-the-night winter-solstice ritual."
New York City was a spectacular place in which to take a walk in the middle of the night if you were a young, ambitious, confident man.
Of course she ached to be a writer. Like so many women, she burned for it, all she wanted to do was to publish, and her whole life was leading toward the moment when she found an agent and a publisher and her first book appeared.
I hadn't asked him the question out of actual concern; it was more of a marital reflex. All over the world, husbands and wives routinely and somewhat pointlessly ask one another: Are you okay? It's part of the contract; it's the thing to do, because it implies that you care, that you're paying attention, when in fact you might be deeply and relentlessly bored.
If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it.
It always seemed that the smaller the pie, the greater the need to have more of it.
He was American and introspective and always taking his own pulse on the page. As Harry had said, he was politically correct, yet somehow he wasn't at all political.
I knew that if I were a better person, I would have stayed up with him, the way I used to do each year. But I was tired, and longed for sleep the way I used to long for the press of our two bodies.
I could hear him scrabble around downstairs like a hamster, opening drawers in the kitchen and taking things out, banging together what sounded like a cheese grater and a spoon, in an obvious, pathetic attempt to wake me up.
I knew how he operated; I knew everything about him, the way wives do.
Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice.
For a long time I was as strongly sexual as he was, and then suddenly, somewhere in my forties, I realized that I wasn't anymore, that it had simply gone away, taking with it my happiness, my willingness, my sense of being Joe Castleman's other half.
"Do you know that you're a totally pathetic person?" I said. "I trust you mean 'pathetic' in the best sense of the word," said Joe with a slight smile.
But still, somehow, everything would be all right, because he had a wife, which is something that everyone needs.
The connection was infused with a crackle and the slightest quality that suggested both voices were trapped in a time-delay tunnel.
"This is the beginning of a new phase, Joan." "Yes, the insufferable phase," I said.
Joe Castleman knew he was special, though not so special that he could avoid the things of everyday life.
"I want to jump," he said. "Like the kids used to." I thought of David and Susannah and Alice, and the way their small bodies had shot up into the air, pajamas flapping, shrieks of pleasure accompanying each jump. Why do children love to jump?
"Oh, come on, Joanie." It was a name he hadn't called me in a very long time, and he understood that the siren call of it would have an effect. It did. Despite myself, it roused something in me. I was an idiot to be taken in again and again by him, wasn't I? To celebrate him, to sing him, but I couldn't find it in me to be any other way. It took a moment, but finally I brought myself to a wobbly standing position on the bed.
They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone.
I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary.
Bancroft Road was dark, with no streetlamps, and I could see into front windows where faculty members and their wives and children shuffled around living rooms. Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn't exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood?
Language only felt infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.
I knew what I was up against, that women would fling themselves at him like lemmings who had a love-wish instead of a death-wish.
Virgin writers have a sheen to them, a layer of something that comes off on your fingers when you touch it, like powder from a moth's wings.
"They'll be fine," Joe said, a father's refrain, based on nothing except the intolerance of the possibility of disaster
Most of these young men were writing their own novels: long, rambling, "ambitious" books that weighed as much as full-term infants.
He was terrified of death. More immediately, he was terrified of sleep, death's dress rehearsal.
We gave them everything we had. All our possessions were theirs. Our children were theirs. Our lives belonged to them. Our weary, been-through-the-mill bodies were theirs, too, though more often than not they didn't want them anymore.
Bats circled the pines all around our cottage and sometimes hung like change purses from the roof of our veranda, and the night bristled with forest-bright animal eyes, and the arrhythmic clicking of strange bugs that I hoped never to see, but which I'd simply agreed to live among for twelve days.
"Every marriage is just two people striking a bargain"
Meg Wolitzer brings her characteristic wit and intelligence to a provocative story about the evolution of a marriage, the nature of partnership, the question of a male or female sensibility, and the place for an ambitious woman in a man's world.
The moment Joan Castleman decides to leave her husband, they are thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean on a flight to Helsinki. Joan's husband Joseph is one of America's preeminent novelists, about to receive a prestigious international award, and Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, has finally decided to stop. From this gripping opening, Meg Wolitzer flashes back to Smith College and Greenwich Village in the 1950s and follows the course of the marriage that has brought the couple to this breaking pointâ??one that results in a shocking revelation.
With her skillful storytelling and pitch-perfect observations, Wolitzer has crafted a wise and candid look at the choices all men and women makeâ??in marriage, work, and life
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En un texto muy ágil, tÃpico de Meg Wolitzer, se van desarrollando a la vez la historia del triunfo literario de Joe y la de su pasión por las mujeres. Destaca la agudeza con la que la autora describe el ambiente literario, con sus envidias y sus traiciones. Esta visión intencionada y penetrante, junto con la elaborada voz en primera persona, convierte La buena esposa en una novela original, ágil y de singular interés.