![]() Along the way, Wolitzer, a reliably witty, trenchant social observer, takes on the politics of high school faculties, riffing on the burdens of social kissing, bringing hummus to a pot-luck dinner and weight gain and desire. ![]() Multiple interconnected relationships are tested and redefined by this mysterious spell-among them, once smugly married high school teachers Robby and Dory Lang, their teenage daughter, Willa, and her first love, Eli, and a philandering principal and his school-psychologist mistress. Yet the American writer deftly renders the twinned scenarios utterly plausible, even realistic, and uses them to explore big themes: the complexities of mid-life marriage, the waxing and waning of sexual desire, and ultimately how much we really know those to whom we’re closest. ![]() In lesser hands, such an ambitious high-concept scenario could have descended into magic-realism preciosity. ![]() There’s more: this mysterious collective not-tonight-dear headache takes grip just as the local high school is preparing to stage a production of Lysistrata, the famed Greek comedy in which women organize a sex strike to stop a war. ![]() Only a novelist as skilled as Meg Wolitzer could pull off the preposterous conceit that animates her playful new novel: a “formidable wind” blows through a small New Jersey community, casting a spell that causes women, one by one, to lose desire for their partners. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |