The Ten-Year Nap

Meg Wolitzer's very entertaining new novel explores the linked lives of four New York women friends who find themselves more or less stranded in a version of their lives they don't recognize--a doldrum when the intensity of raising infants is over. But they've been out of the workforce so long they don't know who they are except wives and mothers. Wolitzer knows the territory cold, her ear for dialogue is impeccable, and she's created a marvelous kaleidoscope of personalities linked in a pattern that changes as we watch. Alyssa Bresnahan's performance is nuanced, well paced, and sympathetic, and her voice is lovely. But doesn't anyone in the studio have a biographical dictionary? If Freud is pronounced "froid," is Freund rendered as "froond" even a good guess? B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

December 24, 2007
In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife
; etc.) takes a close look at the “opt out” generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women’s liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters’ crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer’s novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women’s (and men’s) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose.