"People usually thought we were a 'good' couple, and I suppose that once, a long, long time ago, back when the cave painting were first sketched on the rough walls at Lascaux, back when the earth was uncharted and everything seemed hopeful, this was true. But soon enough we moved from the glory and self-love of any young couple to the green-algae swamp of what is delicately known as "later life."
A few weeks ago when Lemon and I were at work (we work together, live in the same room, write this blog together, and we still choose to hang out with each other everyday) we were perusing our respective Amazon accounts (Where do we work?! It’s fine, we really do work), and Lemon brought up a new book that sounded awesome: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. As we read some of the reviews we concluded that Wolitzer was probably a literary soul mate of ours and we couldn’t figure out why we hadn’t read anything by her before. We took to reading Amazon reviews of her other novels almost immediately and learned that basically every single one sounded fantastic. Lucky for us, we had a planned book-buying date the following day where we both purchased multiple novels by our soon-to-be favorite author of the moment.
Lemon read The Uncoupling first, which I can’t wait to read myself, while I read The Wife. I debated whether or not I wanted to review this book because it focuses on the relationship between two people who have been married for forty years. Seeing as how I am currently unmarried (at least for another 123 days), I wasn’t sure I would have much insight to bring to this topic because I obviously know nothing about being married. As I thought about the book more I realized that there was a lot more to the plot and the themes were not mutually exclusive to those in a marriage relationship.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the novel in this post because there are some pretty major plot twists, so I’m going to be fairly general here. The novel begins with a woman, Joan Castleman, deciding, on an airplane, flying over the ocean, sitting next to her husband of forty years, that she wants a divorce. As Joan recounts the past forty years, the humiliation and betrayal she has suffered at the hands of her husband’s actions, the stifling of her own dreams and aspirations that have come as a result of her marriage to this man, I was reminded of the Kate Chopin’s tragic novella, The Awakening. Side note: I adore The Awakening, so the similarities were enticing, but I digress. There was a huge difference between Chopin’s story and Wolitzer’s. Wolitzer’s suffering housewife was married in the the late 50s with the early parts of her marriage being largely in the 1960s. That being said, unlike Edna in Chopin’s story, Wolitzer’s protagonist had other social options than to get married. She didn’t need marriage to secure her place in society, and she didn’t need it in order to be successful in the eyes of her culture. She chose marriage, and she chose her husband, yet at 40,000 feet in the air, after years of a difficult marriage, Joan has an awakening of her own.
As Joan’s perspective of the past forty years are described in the novel, the reader can’t help but root for this strong and brilliant woman to leave this man who is uninterested in monogamy or anything else self-sacrificing. The reader, like many other characters in the novel, see her potential that has been squelched by this “terrible man.” I found myself guilty of this surface-level reading up until the novel’s end when Wolitzer’s forces you to look at the situation, at the Castleman’s, more complexly.
Sure, Joan’s husband could’ve, in a lot of ways, been a better husband, but she concludes that this situation she has found herself in, this marriage, was not something that happened to her, it was something she chose. The treatment she endured within her marriage was also something she chose to approach passively, the decision to not pursue her dreams, to ride on the laurels of her husband’s success thinking it enough to satisfy her own ambitions, was a mistake she made. She recognizes the responsibility each individual has in their current situations. Obviously, we all come into contact with people who are selfish, or self-absorbed and aren’t looking out for our own best interest but if that person gains significant influence and say in our lives, that is, most often times, our own doing. We are never innocent in our situations because we are all broken humans who fail to love others and love ourselves as much as we should.
At the end of the novel Joan concludes that she is going to make up for the past forty years, leave her husband, and finally begin her life, ousting him for all the wrong he’s done in their marriage. The thought of such an action is completely satisfying, to both Joan and the reader, but the time comes for her to act on this and she doesn’t follow through. One could conclude that Joan is simply following the trend she has set for the past forty years in her marriage, a natural passivity and desire to remain neutral in her husband’s actions, but this is not the case in her final act of the novel. She recognizes this satisfaction is fleeting and would never make up for the fact that she has fault in the situation. In the greater scheme, revealing her husband to be the man he truly is wouldn’t really satisfy the disappointment she feels for not pursuing her dreams and her talents.
We all make choices; we can blame those involved with our choices when our lives don’t turn out the way we thought they should, or we can recognize our own hand in it. Taking responsibility in our circumstances allows for real change and self-examination rather than fleeting self-satisfaction. I don’t yet know the weight of what it means to weave your life into another’s for the rest of your life, and there are many things within this book that I don’t feel I can speak to, but I know that marriage is a decision made by two people, and we can’t live our lives in blame of the other and expect to grow.
Kansas
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