Review: The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer; or, My Mumsy enjoyed her chocolate cake (a guest review)

So far my mother has only said overwhelmingly positive things in her guest reviews. I feel like y’all will begin to think that my mother likes every book she reads, and look, she doesn’t. There are many books, including some I initially think are a really good idea for a gift, that my mother doesn’t care for at all. She is pleasingly forthright about this, and then I always know what the book’s flaws are, and I have a good notion of whether I will find them to be surmountable. Here is a book my Mumsy did not care for. (P.S. Chocolate cake here means my sisters and me. We are unfailingly delightful. Of course.)

The Ten-Year Nap, by Meg Wolitzer

The “ten-year nap” of Meg Wolitzer’s title is the ten years that each of her female protagonists spends as an at-home mother. And before I review this book, I just want to say this: NAP??? Really, Meg Wolitzer? What an unbelievable insult to every woman (and man) who has worked her tail off caring for infants, toddlers, pre-, middle- and high school-aged children.

The reviewer at Salon suggests that Wolitzer’s “one agenda” is to “tell the truth about the lives” of at-home mothers. If this is a true portrait of their lives, it is a portrait done in mind-numbing, monochromatic, institutional green. We meet Amy, once a half-hearted lawyer, now the mother of young Mason and the wife of Leo, who doesn’t want to have sex with her. Her best friend, the gorgeous blonde Jill, lives in the suburbs and hasn’t made a friend in a year, mostly because all she can think about is her bizarrely disproportionate terror that adopted daughter Nadia may have a learning disability. They are joined by Roberta, the absurdly stereotypical politically active Jewish artist, who has lost her ability to paint; and finally, Karen, (also a walking stereotype), an Asian mother of twins who enjoys nothing more than reciting the Fibonacci sequence to herself. With the exception of Karen, the least-developed of the four characters, all the women are deeply self-absorbed and miserable; each of them believes that her life, and yes, her self, is worthless, because she is no longer doing the job she worked at ten years ago.

Now, forgive me if I sound harsh, but here were my exact thoughts: Okay. You had a choice between chocolate cake and apple pie. You chose the cake. Are you really going to spit out all your cake and fret endlessly about the pie you didn’t choose? Or is it conceivable that you might grow up, acknowledge your choice, and enjoy the cake?

I got so sick of these women. I have to say, this is one of the dreariest, most joyless books I have ever read. If the women and their husbands hadn’t been such obvious cartoons, I would say I would run for miles rather than spend any time with them; but since they never came to life, no worries. Wolitzer has an unpleasant habit of drawing pointless, ineffective metaphors (“‘Mason,’ she cried in a dry, fruitless voice.”), but she occasionally tells a marvelous story: the one I liked was when Roberta was doing a puppet show for some children, and one of them stands up and cries, “Oh, Mommy, when will it be over?” Not only is that a funny story, it perfectly expresses my feelings as I plowed through this novel.

Other reviews:

Linus’s Blanket
She Is Too Fond of Books
Everyday I Write the Book Blog
Booking Mama
Books on the Brain
drey’s library
Books Ahoy!
Small World Reads
A Reader’s Respite

Let me know if I missed yours!