LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
BOOKED Solid |
A Review By Rebecca James |
The Ten-Year Nap Meg Wolitzer (2008)
Bank teller, Baltimore Colts cheerleader, real estate agent, police officer, correctional officer. She did it all. My mother, an only child, was born in 1951. Her mother worked as a school librarian, although my grandmother ("Mom Mom" we called her) stayed at home for most of my mother's younger years, returning to college much later in life. My own mother, a young woman at the height of early 1970s feminist activism, dropped out of college (she would return part time and finally earn her bachelor's degree when I was a teenager) and joined the working world at 19. When Ithe oldestwas born six years later, she was spared a few months off and then back to work it was. Despite the emphasis on women's right to valuable and valued work, my mother always lamented her situation. She wanted nothing more than to stay home and raise a family. I, who was never terribly interested (at least not consistently) in having children, always shook my head in disbelief. "Why on earth would any woman want to be locked in an eternal child-focused world with little adult companionship?" I always thought to myself. There was so much out there to explore with my hard-won education as a guide. However, the ability to choose one option or another without the gender-biased expectations was an important element of feminism and it is the product of that arrangement that serves as the major theme for Meg Wolitzer's recently-released novel The Ten-Year Nap. "Her daughters Naomi, Amy, and Jennifer wouldn't need to be tough and complaining and groundbreaking, as Antonia and her friends now were. For these girls there would be no Popsicle-cold speculums slid with excruciating self-consciousness into oneself in the bright light of someone else's living room, G&Ts and crackers and cheddar cheese balls rolled with nuts on a nearby sideboard and the snow whirling outside the dark windows. Instead, all of the women's daughters would become a generation of post-speculum feminists. They would grow up to be women who would live with men and children in a kind of harmony previously unseen in the world." Wolitzer moves between the past and the present, linking her many characters with mother-daughter relationships, friendships, and child-based acquaintances. Antonia Lamb, whose thoughts appear above, eventually found her daughter, Amy, to be less than satisfied with many of the choices she had in life. While Amy wishes her time as a stay-at-home mom were valued more, she and her friendsmost of whom left high-paying professional careers to tend to their very upper middle class familiesstill question their choices to leave the working world. At the same time, Amy and the other characters question the effects of both their divided roles and their children on their marriages. When a new working mom from Amy's child's school confesses to an affair with a younger man in her office, Amy is envious of the excitement: "She thought of those younger men in their twenties whose arms were lined with light hair and whose stomachs hadn't yet been tenderized by a continual influx of breakfast-meeting pastries and nighttime cookies, or by the long spiral freefall of middle-aged resignation. She remembered how, when you are so young, you rarely think about the direction or purpose of love. Instead, you just follow it wherever it goes. That is what she used to do all the time, and it was what Penny was now doing with Ian. Amy watched it all from a distance, like the crippled girl in a wheelchair in an old storybook, looking on as Heidi and Peter frolic and f**k on the side of a mountain." The women are loosely connected by this theme of unrest largely linked to their family decisions, but also by the very nature of their gender. Wolitzer uses the image of the morning alarm clock to create the idea of universal experiences. Even as one woman moves to the suburbs while another lives in an upscale condo and still another squeezes into a too-small apartment, their experiences have a shared quality to them, partly because of the sharing nature of their friendships: "So Amy told her about how she'd once sat in the corner of a party when they were both freshmen at Penn, and a beautiful woman had come over to her, and they'd started talking. Somehow, the woman had ended up sitting on the arm of the chair, and a little while later, she'd leaned down and kissed Amy on the mouth, and Amy had kissed back [...] 'It was exciting, actually [...] I guess I was confused by it then. I didn't know that you could be excited by something that you'd never desired before.' 'At least not consciously desired.' 'I don't think I'm much of a lesbian,' said Amy. 'But I did like the idea of trying on a life.'"And it is precisely that notion that carries through much of what the women share. None seems settled in the role she has chosenit's as though each is still trying on the life she lives, hoping it will eventually stretch to fit. Wolitzer does an entertaining job of collecting these experiences in her novel, The Ten-Year Nap. Rebecca James is an assistant principal and former English teacher in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She enjoys finding beach time to read in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 18, No. 12 August 22, 2008 |