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 1950s Smith College and Greenwich Village and follows the course of the marriage that has brought the couple to this breaking point — 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 make — in marriage, work, and life.
Joan is 64, married to a literary lion, Joe Castleman, one of the big men in the world who "derived much of his style from 'The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.' " They are on their way to Helsinki where he will receive the prestigious Helsinki Prize, $525,000, awarded to a writer, one step down from the Nobel. This is as far as Joan will climb with him, though he does not yet know it. While their three children have grown in various states of contortion around his ego and their marriage, she is the real writer in the marriage, and she has borne him all the way: his affairs, successes, setbacks with a grace that is the envy of their friends and acquaintances. But now she's done. Not mad, just ready to have her own life.
It has by no means been a life of quiet suffering. It was a life she chose as a young student at Smith College, a promising writer in her own right, who fell in love with her professor, Castleman, and seduced him knowingly, so that he was eventually forced to leave his wife and baby daughter. She became the "alpha wife" at literary conferences and parties, and she enjoys it with a kind of Mrs. Ramseylike artfulness.
Various literary women make an impression on her and haunt her decisions: "Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers.… If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers."
Wolitzer's world is John Updike's world, but her writing is at once grittier and bigger. It's hard to tell how old she is because she writes with so little bitterness. I hope that "The Wife" might appeal to both men and women. It is as much about the male psyche as it is about the woman's. --Susan Salter Reynolds