I Wish I Knew How to Quit You, Ayelet

But apparently I don't. Ayelet Waldman has a new novel, and the media is agog with profiles and reviews that I seem unable to resist. You want proof of my obsession?

East Bay Express
Gothamist
San Francisco Chronicle
New York Times
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
New York Magazine
USA Today
Yale Daily News
LA Times*
The Oregonian
Washington Post
Newsday
North Bay Bohemian
New York Observer*

*worth reading

Then there's the not-very-good excerpt in Salon or you can go here, search "Ayelet," and find a bunch of psychotic New York moms going off on her. And what the hell, while we're at it, here's Amazon, with the usual collection of passionately unenlightening customer reviews.

But what of the book itself? As I cruised the internet, I couldn't decide what to do. With the last bit of self-respect I still have, I would not let myself buy the hardcover. I considered entering the queue at the library, but didn't have the energy. Wait for the paperback? Did I even really want to read it?

Then, last week, as I pondered my plight, I was saved by my lovely sister-in-law, she who works at the bookstore and provides wonderful bookly gifts like an advance reading copy of the novel (it does have a name: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits), accompanied by a note saying that she saw it on the staff shelf at the bookstore, remembered that I loved Ayelet, and grabbed it for me. I emailed her immediately with profuse thanks, though I did specify that it is not exactly love that I feel for Ayelet, but rather ambivalent obsession.

Reader, I read it. And it was...well, it was ok. Not so bad. Or rather, bad in some ways, but not in others. I'm actually NOT not quite sure about this one. It's just...complicated.

First of all, Ayelet isn't a very good writer, sentence-wise, and that bothers me. I actually had to get a pen (I never write in books in pen, just pencil, but this was an advance reading copy which is not exactly a book, and I couldn't find a pencil, so I decided it was ok) and mark the sentences that just...clunked (not to mention the ones that were grammatically incorrect) (and the typos--Ayelet apparently remains incapable of proofreading) (I found the outrageous number of typos in her mystery series appalling, and, according to Jenny, they are notorious in the mystery-writing world).

Second, too much of the novel is schematic, often to the point of cliche: the nasty ex-wife, the gay best friend, the (explicitly pointed out) congruence between the heroine's marriage and her parents'. (Oh yeah, maybe you don't know what the book is about, not having compulsively followed the media even before you read it. Emilia Greenleaf is passionately in love with her husband, coping with the SIDS death of her two-day-old daughter, and struggling with her impossible stepson: complications ensue.) The schematism comes to a climax, not surprisingly, at the conclusion where everything works out neatly--too neatly: the bad guy does a good thing, Emilia suddenly develops articulate insight and does the right thing, and absolute narrative, thematic, and symbolic closure ensues.

So what's to like? Well, Ayelet has a great eye for the zeitgeist: she captures the expensive New York mommy world, staying, for the most part, just this side of satire (I've seen those women in Central Park at their stroller exercise class). She's good on Central Park too, and there's something about Emilia's combination of narcissism and self-awareness that is interestingly complicated, more complicated than the plot ends up. Her command of narrative structure is increasingly skilled, even if she ultimately capitulates to the simplicity of romance (not that there's anything wrong with romance, if that's what you know you want to be writing--and reading). And the book is, essentially, readable, which I do not mean to damn with faint praise, for too many novels these days are high-minded or important or deep, but not particularly readable.

Virtually all the reviews harp on Emilia's similarity to Ayelet and the thematic links between the novel and her NY Times essay and Oprah appearance (remember? the whole loves her husband more than her children thing?), but that's pretty boring to me. A novel deserves to stand on its own two feet, and this one pretty much does--I read it in two days and kept thinking about it, though that may be because I was so bent on figuring out how I felt about it. Ultimately, I'd say it's not a great novel, perhaps not even good, but certainly better than many, thought-provoking in its flaws and engaging in the social and emotional world it creates, even if that world is deeply privileged and claustrophobic (hey, Trollope wrote mainly about rich, tormented people too, though Ayelet is no Trollope) (nor is she Sue Miller, whom she apparently aspires to be) (but she is herself, carving out her literary corner of 21st-century motherhood, and that's something).

OK, I think I can stop now. And I hope this has gotten Ayelet out of my system--at least till her next book appears.