Forget the strategic petroleum reserve. The nation’s greatest source of potential energy — powerful enough to light a billion or so homes for a gazillion years, give or take a millennium or two — are women who leave the workforce to raise their kids.
That’s how it seems, anyway, when you consider the wit, strength and inventiveness of the women in Meg Wolitzer’s charming, provocative new novel, “The Ten-Year Nap” (Riverhead). It’s another winner for Wolitzer, who has written eight books and raised two kids, and who makes the case, quietly and patiently, that so-called domestic issues are as momentous as topics such as war, death and Wall Street — topics, that is, often favored by male writers.
Wolitzer’s novels rarely receive the attention they deserve because, by and large, they deal with — what to call them? — second-tier topics, I suppose. Not combat. Not shouting matches with God. Not treaty signings and troop maneuvers. Rather, she writes about friendship, about aging, about the way sex and love do some shape-shifting over time, about parents and children, about ambition, about public images and private selves. “The Ten-Year Nap” follows a constellation of couples whose female halves have decided to leave their careers and watch the kids — a decision that leaves some women defensive and touchy, others blissful and fulfilled, but one that changes every family.
Incisive and clear-eyed
Wolitzer is as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as Tom Wolfe; she is as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike. But you won’t often hear her mentioned in the same breath as these oft-praised gentlemen, because she writes about life at eye level. She writes about kitchen counters crowded with cereal boxes; closets tangled with wadded-up, inside-out jackets and deflated basketballs; nightstands piled with half-read novels and half-empty bottles of Ambien. She doesn’t write about distant horizons or great escapes or mad passions. Her characters are too busy for that; there’s generally a roast in the oven, or a permission slip to sign so that a 4th grader can go on a field trip tomorrow with the rest of the class.
Jane Austen’s reputation ran afoul of the same prejudice that keeps Wolitzer’s tethered: How can you write about courtship, about selecting a proper ball gown for a country dance, when armies are on the march? How can you worry about matchmaking when political catastrophes loom? Yet as Austen knew — and as Wolitzer knows — we don’t live amid catastrophes. We live amid half-done algebra homework and ominously bulky envelopes containing the monthly credit-card bill. We live amid dailiness. Amid mess and bustle and bother. Only rarely do most of us deal with profound, world-shifting, civilization-imperiling events — but all too often, we do find ourselves apologizing for forgetting the vet appointment for a lethargic hamster.
About as real as it gets
What you’ll find in “The Ten-Year Nap” is not a solution to terrorism or a way to re-attach that fallen ice shelf in Antarctica (although if Elmer’s Glue would work, Wolitzer’s characters would probably have some handy in their purses or backpacks). Instead, you will find a beautifully precise description of modern family life: the compromises, the peculiarities, the questions, the reconciliations to fate and necessity. And plenty of lost socks.
You’ll find the quiet yearning of mothers and fathers as they seek to balance work and home. “How, she thought, could you possibly choose a corporate law firm or a company’s soullessness … over your baby’s hopeful, open soul?” a character wonders. “A law firm or a corporation could never give you what your baby did; it didn’t need you or love you.” And yet there is nothing wrong with worldly ambition, either; ambition built the pyramids, built Microsoft, and ambition’s rewards are what pay the bills so that the beloved child can eat. Wolitzer is terrific at depicting the ambiguity of modern family life, its murky moral choices and thorny dilemmas.
Written with the author’s trademark blend of tenderness and bite, “The Ten-Year Nap” is as up-to-the-minute about contemporary America as a YouTube video. “War and Peace,” it isn’t. But then again, could Tolstoy ever have written the scene about a public breast-feeding moment gone wrong that enlivens a chapter in Wolitzer’s novel? Don’t think so.