The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer

The Barnes & Noble Review

Meg Wolitzer has established herself, intentionally or not, as the fiction laureate of feminist social politics with her previous two novels: The Wife, the story of a secret literary collaboration between an award-winning, philandering writer and his brilliant wife, and The Position, which reveals the lasting impact of the sexual revolution on the four children of a pair of cultural provocateurs. Thus, The Ten-Year Nap completes a trilogy of sorts, introducing four New York women who've opted out of their impressive careers to choose full-time motherhood and are finding themselves locked into what is now a familiar dilemma: how to be an ambidextrous Superwoman while negotiating a postnatal identity crisis. Lest readers think an F-word novel -- by which I mean "feminist" -- could only be humorless, unappealing, passé, or heavily weighed down with an agenda of some kind, they will be pleasantly disappointed by Wolitzer's droll, urbane wit and her spot-on depictions of women's lives amid the demanding, competitive, and exhilarating metropolis, as she dispels the media-perpetuated myth of the "post-feminist" era.

The Ten-Year Nap isn't especially plot-driven, but neither does it lack for absorbing, extremely sympathetic drama. We meet former trusts-and-estates lawyer Amy Lamb and her three closest friends, as they consider their lives before and after the birth of their children and the possibility of returning to work. Amy's particular psychic crisis is sparked by the sudden death of her neighbor, a 30-something man who leaves behind a stay-at-home wife and children, and an exorbitant rent at their modest Upper East Side apartment building that is likely beyond their means. This predicament sets Amy's head spinning: "She thought, self-indulgently, of [her husband] Leo and herself, and she imagined everything ruined, lost."

It doesn't help that she grew up the daughter of a second-wave feminist. Amy and her circle are keenly conscious of their wrestling match between an enlightened conscience and the desire to be a domestic caretaker -- and, for some, an additional struggle with the financial repercussions of that choice. The group spans the spectrum of New York City's waning middle-class (though in any other city besides New York, their husbands' respective salaries would qualify them for a higher rung on the economic ladder). Amy's best friend Jill Hamlin, a onetime academic star, held a position as a film scout; her abortion-activist friend Roberta Sokolov is an artist and worked as a puppeteer; and Karen Yip worked as a statistical analyst. Not surprisingly, only Karen can afford to be a full-time mother in Manhattan; Jill has recently defected to the New Jersey suburb "Holly Hills" to make it work for her.

But the Lamb-Buckners are determined to stick it out in Manhattan, even though Leo -- a lawyer at a mid-level law firm -- sees his six-figure salary depleted by their rent and their ten-year-old son's private school tuition. Not that Amy can bear to know the details: "Once she started looking with any depth at their money, she became anxious and quickly backed away from her own curiosity."

So then how does Penny Ramsey -- a museum director, mother of three, and wife of a hedge fund manager -- do it? And for that matter, how did Amy's mother, the formidable Antonia Lamb, who had a midlife feminist awakening, balance a luminous literary career with raising three girls? (As Amy remembers, it her mother emotionally abandoned them at a most critical time: pubescence.) Antonia has set the bar high for her daughter, nagging her to rise to it by recovering her career after the ten-year break that gives the book its title. Wolitzer grants us entry into Amy's mind, whose interior monologues vividly and poignantly evoke a brain working overtime to mediate her worries about friends and family and her self-scrutiny, insecurity, and self-comparisons to peers, especially working mothers like Penny. Amy gets defensive in Penny's company, bracing herself for the kind of judgment she'd come to expect from her mother. "[Penny] was so accomplished and serene. Every part of Penny's life managed to function in cooperation with every other part." And the idealization doesn't stop there: "Amy knew that Penny Ramsey didn't wonder about what women like Amy did all day without a job to go to. Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness."

While Penny is regarded as both a marvel and a source of amusement for Amy's friends, because she appears as a living embodiment of an impossible and idealized notion of what is expected of them, they all sense there is more to her story. Is it possible that a human being could really juggle a family and a career with such finesse? The whole concept of Penny makes Amy wonder if she is squandering her own time now that her son, Mason, doesn't require her constant attention.

Wolitzer doesn't let that question hang in the air too long. Penny and Amy strike up a friendship -- well, Penny enslaves an initially willing and awestruck Amy as her confidante -- and it doesn't take too long for the stay-at-home mom to see the many cracks in her veneer, namely her extramarital affair with an English man. But she can't contain her prurient fascination with the Wonder Woman: Penny unwittingly offers vicarious pleasures (since the Lamb-Buckners have been wrangling with a prolonged bout of bed death), consolation after Amy loses Jill to the suburbs, and a touch of Schadenfreude. Still, her obsessive, codependent friendship with Penny comes at the expense of her other friendships until a joint family vacation sets Amy on a path of disillusionment: She witnesses the full extent of Penny's solipsism and betrayal of both her arrogant husband, who makes her life possible, and her young lover, who risks everything to be with her. And with that epiphany comes a mixture of grief and relief.

The Ten-Year Nap isn't as linear as I've described; it's rich with insightful, deeply felt and realized back-stories about Amy, her family, friends (Jill, who believes she has the attachment disorder she initially assumed her adopted eastern European daughter was suffering; creatively frustrated Rebecca, whose marriage is fraught with artistic jealousy), and, occasionally, those who've affected their respective lives (including my favorite, a fellow mother with anorexia and, amazingly, an entrepreneurial spirit, who at once repels and impresses the women when she announces she's opening a gym called "SlimJim...[for the] big, unexploited consumer base of women with 'eating differences.' "). There is not a false chord in these pages: Wolitzer entertains as she enlightens, which is not to say she writes merely issues-driven novels -- she has never been one to diverge into moralization or vilification. In fact, I felt as deeply sympathetic toward the husbands, who yearned to connect and be involved with their families while doing their own juggling acts, as I did to the women. And that's because Wolitzer has a rare understanding and ability to convey the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of relationships -- be they romantic, platonic, or parental. I admittedly got distracted by a few tangential vignettes, like the short chapter about Nadia Comaneci, Jill's daughter's namesake. But Wolitzer proves a master of the storyteller's art, and the lives of her characters converge to portray, with humor, honesty, and gravitas, the immediacy and flux and demanding nature of motherhood, marriage, and a Manhattan as lived by accomplished, devoted women who often worry no one is listening. --Kera Bolonik

Kera Bolonik's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, Slate, the Forward, and Bookforum, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.

From the Publisher

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women's dream of having it all-work, love, family-without having to give anything up, a lifetime's worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy's obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.

The Washington Post - Sheri Holman

If Wolitzer were content to people her book solely with women happily married and wealthy enough to afford the luxury of ambivalence, it would be a too-familiar read. But she weaves in vignettes of marginal South Dakotans and various iconoclastic mothers and muses, subtly showing how women's individual choices (or lack thereof) are inextricable from the history and future of feminism…The book occasionally reads like an overly earnest polemic or a chatty episode of "The View," but for the most part Wolitzer perfectly captures her women's resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.

The New York Times -

As in earlier novels like The Wife and This Is Your Life, Meg Wolitzer presents a taxonomy of the subspecies known as the urban female. Lavishly educated and ruefully self-aware, the women in The Ten-Year Nap are never quite at the top of their game, time and success having passed them by—because of their gender, weak ambition, middling talent or some combination thereof. Amy and her friends aren't total losers, they're just not big technicolor winners. Caught between the second and third waves of feminism, they've created lives—as daughters do—in opposition to those of their mothers. All this could make for a dreary soup, except that it's a Wolitzer novel, so it's very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene or artifact with deadeye accuracy.

Publishers Weekly

This self-conscious, idea-driven novel is read well by Alyssa Bresnahan, but she doesn't clearly distinguish each mother struggling for identity and purpose in today's confusing "post-feminist" middle class. Speaker identity comes not from the reader but from "Amy said" or "Jill said." There is plenty of irony-note the title-but Bresnahan's ironic tone sometimes leads us to dismiss characters' experiences and feelings. This is not entirely her fault as the main players are somewhat stereotyped: lawyer quits work to care for baby (now aged 10); husband struggles to keep family afloat; grandmother remains feminist warrior; Chinese mother wastes her mathematical genius. But Bresnahan does enliven Wolitzer's recap of modern women's conundrums, so despite limitations, this audio will surely kindle controversy on blogs and at book clubs, kitchen, school and office confabs. Simultaneous release with the Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 24). (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

A wise, witty assessment of the contemporary dilemmas of middle-class mothers (in particular: to work or not to work), set in the competitive terrain of New York City parenting. Using the comfortable format of friendship between four women, Wolitzer's eighth novel (The Position, 2005, etc.) takes ironic stock of how far females have (and haven't) come since feminism tried to rearrange the work/life balance between the sexes. Lawyer Amy Lamb has still not gone back to her job after the birth of her son ten years ago. Her good friend Jill, a one-time prizewinner who recently left Manhattan for the suburbs with her family, is finding it hard to fit in. Their circle also includes ex-artist Roberta who, like Amy, feels happier without the pressures of a job, yet senses dissatisfactions and uncertainty about her identity; and mathematician Karen, whose Chinese parents take great satisfaction in her not needing to work. The women meet for coffee or yoga and mutual support. Aside from Jill's jealousy of Amy's new friendship with glamorous museum director Penny, unaware that the relationship is driven by a shared secret (Penny's extramarital affair), plot events are few. Instead, Wolitzer uses modern domesticity as a lens through which to scrutinize mixed feelings about ambition, marriage, aging, money and the peculiar results of the women's individual choices. Further telling comparisons arise from glimpses of women of their mothers' generation. Instead of conclusions, there are some gradual changes, sometimes for the better. A perceptive, highly pleasurable novel that serves as Wolitzer's up-to-date answer to the old question: "What do women want?"Agent: Suzanne Gluck/William Morris Agency

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