They're sleepwalking through life
The Ten-Year Nap
By Meg Wolitzer Riverhead,
351 pp., $24.95
To be blunt, I want to take the characters in Meg Wolitzer's new novel, "The Ten-Year Nap," and shake them by their 30-something shoulders until they wake up from their self-indulgent siestas. These women, all intelligent, well-educated, urbanites living in a post-9/11 New York City, seem to be immobilized by life.
This is the generation of women who are the daughters of the baby boomers, the progeny who were supposed to have inherited the earth. For them, everything is possible. Except that they move through the privileged streets of Manhattan in a dreamlike state, perfunctorily tending to their children, dabbling in art or volunteerism, but not really doing anything. There is no passion.
As a baby boomer, I don't feel I have the right to criticize them for opting out of the workforce as their children were born. That's a fine and noble choice. But what I can and will criticize them for is squandering their time, for 10 years. They've nearly set us back to the time when Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," and women asked, "Is this all?"
Wolitzer gives us Amy, who only went to law school and became a lawyer because she didn't have the imagination to come up with anything more compelling. Amy has one son, Mason, and a husband who seems removed from her world. "What do you do all day?" Amy imagines her husband asking her. She has no answer. She diverts herself for a time by becoming the cover for a couple having an affair, watching somewhat voyeuristically as they flirt.
And then there's Roberta, a former puppet-maker and artist, whose do-gooder work lands her in South Dakota, helping a teenager who needs an abortion. But Roberta fizzles on her promise to get the girl's work seen by the New York art world.
And Jill, newly suburban, with an adopted daughter who seems to have a learning delay. Jill tries to ignore Nadia's problems, and wonders why she feels no strong emotional connection to her daughter. She floats through her days, numbly refusing to make friends with any of the other mothers in her new Connecticut home.
The fourth woman is the brilliant Karen, who converts miles to kilometers as she drives and recites prime numbers to herself before she goes to sleep each night. Karen likes to apply for jobs and then turn down the offers.
What's wrong with these women? Their mothers, shown in alternating chapters, held consciousness-raising groups and shut themselves in rooms of their own to create. Or they built businesses. They did, they had passion. They then had daughters who come close to throwing it all away.
Even if the reader accepts the choices these women make, their stories don't add up to a good tale. The generational divide is surely an idea that is not going to go away, but to focus on this quiet generation, these lost women, is a snooze. Naming a book "The Ten-Year Nap" feels like more of a warning than a promise: soporific ahead. Wolitzer is a graceful writer, but if the task of an author is to make her readers care about her characters, she's missed the mark.
Wolitzer recently told a reporter, "The notion that everyone has a calling, that everyone has a talent, that everyone has a passion, isn't true." She's certainly right about that, but it also doesn't feel as if she's writing about lives of quiet desperation as much as she's writing about lives of quiet withdrawal. It's not the same thing.
Debra Bruno is an editor and columnist at Legal Times in Washington, D.C. 