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.