It's more than menopausal malaise

I picked up Wayward because it was a New York Times Notable Book in 2021 and I want to know what’s notable in the world of books. I’d heard of Dana Spiotta because I read reviews all the time and mentally filed her name away as an author I ought to look up. 

She’s well-credentialled. Her book Innocents and Others was winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Stone Arabia was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Eat the Document was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Foundation Award. And Lightning Field was another New York Times Notable Book in 2001. 

Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Premio Pivano, a Creative Capital Award, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University Creative Writing program.

Wayward’s point-of-view-character Sam Raymond, short for Samantha (and that she has a male name is not an accident), is a 53-year-old woman who lives in a Syracuse suburb; the wife of Matt, an affluent lawyer; the mother of 16-year-old Ally; the daughter of an aging Lily who lives an hour and a half away from Syracuse. Sam works part time as a docent in the Clara Loomis House, which Spiotta based on the Fayetteville museum home of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19^th century abolitionist and suffragist. 

Sam is unhappy and on page 12 she buys a run-down (but incredibly charming) house in a depressed neighborhood without telling her husband who she’s decided to leave. I was not sympathetic. 

I’m sure other readers can identify with Sam’s angst, but I had trouble with a white, upper-middle-class, wife and mother just chucking her husband and daughter and having the resources to buy a house as easily as buying a pair of sensible shoes. Unfortunately for me, Spiotta writes so well and invents characters and situations so engaging that I stuck with the book and finished it envious of her talent.

The Trump election of 2016 was the final straw for Sam. Her mother is ill but will not say what ails her. Ally is increasingly remote, and Sam finds herself staring into "the Mids"--that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.

Rather than have an affair, Sam falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house, buys it, and abandons suburban life--and her family to grapple with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that feels as if it is coming apart at the seams.

If it were only the malaise of one woman, I would have given up halfway through. But Wayward is much more than Sam’s angst. Spiotta has three chapters from Ally’s point of view. Ally begins having sex with a 29-year-old developer, one of her father’s legal clients. 

He gives Ally Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as her intellectual mentor and she drafts a college application essay that is almost worth the price of the book. Libertarians, she writes, “describe themselves as believing in ultimate equality without condescending ‘nanny-state’ interference.” They tend to believe that a person is homeless because he made “poor choices.” But, Ally asks, “how much of our choices are shaped by things we didn’t choose?”

She points out that libertarians “might take federal, state, and county tax breaks in shitty desperate cities that will do anything for development. But how is that the unfettered marketplace?” And what about “the things people need to do collectively like fire departments and utilities and the post office and schools? . . . Also, protection of private property requires police and prisons and copyrights. So libertarians like rules in some cases. Maybe they are not for total liberty, but for protecting their own liberty at the expense of others’.”

I found the subplot interesting because while the relationship is inappropriate and, I believe, illegal, neither Ally nor the guy suffer any obvious consequences. Ally sends him nude pictures of herself, but, as far as we know, he never shares them or passes them on. By the end of the book, Ally is older and wiser in the ways of men (certain men) but unharmed.

Wayward is indeed, as the publisher says, a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty--female complexity--in the age of Trump. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.

Time for me to look up Spiotta’s earlier books. 

How do you live without short-term memory?

I believe that when this was published in Japan in 2003, the trope of the character who cannot remember anything for longer than eighty minutes was new. That’s the elderly professor of this short novel’s title. 

The housekeeper is—what else?—the professor’s housekeeper. We never learn his name, her name, or the name of her ten-year-old son called “Root” because with his flat-top haircut he resembles, to the professor, the sign for square root. She narrates the story.

The professor lost his memory in an automobile accident. He had been a world-class mathematician, specializing in number theory and the novel offers a few, understandable examples of the kinds of problems he was working with. He can still do some mathematics and one diversion is solving problems in a mathematical journal.

He cannot, however, recall anything else, anything new for more than eighty minutes. Every day when the housekeeper arrives, she has to introduce herself anew. He compensates slightly by writing notes to himself and pinning them to his suit.

Given the strain of keeping house for such a client, the agency has had a problem providing a reliable person who can cook lunch, clean the house, shop, make dinner, and not be flustered by the professor’s condition. The narrator, who is an unmarried woman in her late twenties, needs the work and has essentially been keeping house for her unmarried mother for years. 

When the professor learns that his housekeeper has a ten-year-old son—a latch-key child—he insists that the boy come to the house rather than returning to the empty apartment. They form a kind of family: Grandfather, mother, son. She writes:

“Root had never enjoyed dinner as much as he did when we ate with the Professor. He answered the Professors questions and let him fill his plate to overflowing, and whenever he could, he looked curiously around the room or stole a glance at the notes on the Professor’s suit.” The idyll cannot last, but by this point in the book we are invested in the characters.

According to an interview in the UK’s Independent Ogawa wrote for herself growing up. She married a steel company engineer, quit her job as a medical university secretary, and wrote. She didn’t intentionally keep it secret, but her husband learned about her writing only when her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, received a literary prize. “I wasn’t telling anyone in a big voice, ‘I’m writing a novel,’” she says. “But I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know.”

She had a son, and her novella Pregnancy Diary won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and she continued to write. “I would change a diaper and then write a sentence. Then I’d make a meal and write a sentence. Now that my son has grown, I feel like I was at my happiest when I was writing while raising my child. Now that I can write as much as I want 24 hours a day, it’s not as if I produce any greater work now than I did in the past.” Ogawa achieved bestseller status and a film adaptation with The Professor and the Housekeeper.

Her translator Stephen Snyder who is a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College, says Ogawa’s novels relate to Japanese culture in “ancillary ways.” Though she raises socially relevant themes, he says, she is never doctrinaire. “There is a naturalness to what she writes so it never feels forced. Her narrative seems to be flowing from a source that’s hard to identify.”

The Professor and the Housekeeper is an interesting depiction of three lives. (I almost wrote “of three Japanese lives” but it is more universal than that) and ultimately moving.

A cautionary tale for potential adulterers

Ema and Paul, married to other people, work in the same labor court outside of Paris, and they begin falling in love in Paul’s car which the author describes in some detail, indeed in more detail than she describes the appearance of Ema or Paul, their spouses, or their children. Thus the title Geography of an Adultery, Agnès Riva’s slim first novel.

According to the note on the author in the book, Riva lives in the suburbs of Paris “where she draws inspiration from its urban landscape.” Geography of an Adultery was short listed for a Discovery Grant from the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt and Grand Prix RTL-Lire. John Cullen translated books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian. He died shortly after he delivered this translation to the publisher.

The affair begins in Paul’s car, moves to a corner of the kitchen in Ema’s house, to an empty chapel on the outskirts of town, to Paul’s house briefly (they live within walking distance of each other), and is finally consummated in an apartment hotel.

Agnès Riva tells the story entirely from Ema’s point of view. He never learn what Paul is thinking, only what he says to her: “You have to compartmentalize,” he tells her, and we understand even if Ema doesn’t know how to keep the parts of her life separate, that’s how Paul manages his life. “Don’t let your personal feeling affect judgments that must remain rational.” Ema finds this schoolmasterish advice aggravating and sexually arousing.

Paul clearly finds Ema sexually desirable. “I don’t think we’ll ever be more excited than this,” he murmurs in her ear during heavy petting in her kitchen. He says it “as if he wants her to take the next step but has no intention of forcing her.” Reaching that step takes another ninety pages. 

One of the things that makes this slim debut novel so interesting is Riva’s evocation of Ema’s internal life, her feelings, the tension between abandonment—her desire for excitement, adventure, passion—and the fear of getting caught. 

“Her attempts to establish routines that can be counted on, like her offer of her house as a place where they can see each other outside of work, have ended in failure, for Paul’s visits remain as irregular as always. Between one encounter and the next, it seems to her, the man quite simply forgets her; he moves on to something else.”

Another thing that makes the story ring so true is the author’s ability to convey the contrast between Ema’s expectations and Paul’s. Because it is an affair and not a romance between two single people that can lead to marriage or a stable union, they cannot easily work out their differences.

Riva writes, “In principle, Paul wouldn’t be against finding a place, an apartment, for example, that they could rent for their romantic encounters.” [They can afford one? And hide the expense from their spouses? Never mind.] 

“But when they envision the passion they will know in their proposed love nest, what each sees differs a little from the other’s version. Paul pictures a place where desire can be ‘contained,’ shielded from prying eyes for as long as their romance lasts,” [He’s already assuming the romance has a time limit.] “whereas Ema, by contrast, hopes it will allow their sensitivities a new freedom of expression.” In any case, while Paul talks about renting a place, he makes no effort to do so.

Without preaching or proselytizing, the novel makes a solid case against adultery. It should be no spoiler to read that when Ema and Paul finally do create the conditions in which they can make love, the experience not that great.

“The young woman has often imagined this moment, and now that it’s here, she feels something like indifference, like absence from the unfolding scene. Her head is clear, and on the one hand she can visualize all the elaborate fantasies she’s built up around her desire, and on the other, she can see Paul and herself, here on the bed, but she can’t, despite her efforts, manage to connect the two sights.”

Readers who have committed adultery can compare and contrast their thoughts and experiences to Ema’s. Readers who have ever toyed with the idea of an affair should read this as a cautionary tale and be prepared to be disappointed. Reality is almost never as stimulating as fantasy.