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Austinist Book Review: Meg Wolitzer, "The Position"
Austinist would like to apologize to the millions of readers who have given themselves carpal tunnel syndrome checking this space over and over again for our latest book review, which is presented below, several days overdue. We’ve been struggling to deal with “Brideshead Revisited.” We love Evelyn Waugh (“A Handful of Dust” is on our top-ten list, and “Vile Bodies” is really good after you soldier through the stuff on the boat) and “Brideshead Revisited” is often cited as his best book. But we never got around to it, largely because we were under the blockheaded impression that the “Revisited” part of the title implied a “Brideshead Visited” somewhere in the catalogue. And we’re nothing if not sequential. But it turns out that Brideshead is a house, not a novel. Anyway. We’re sorry to report that we find “Brideshead Revisted” pretty annoying so far. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that if Sebastian Flyte was alive today, he’d be this guy?
Under review today is Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, “The Position,” which reminds us of her last novel, “The Wife,” in several ways. Both come saddled with a synopsis that portends disaster (for the reader). “The Wife” tells the story of Joan Castleman, a once-promising student whose creative potential is thwarted by her marriage to a famous and heavily-awarded writer. “The Position” deals with Paul and Roz Mellow, who wrote a sex book in the 1970s, and their four children, who are still struggling to cope with the fallout thirty years later.
More interesting is a thematic similarity. Both are concerned with the most destructive emotion available to modern egotists: not love, but pride. Increasingly few couples have to defend their relationships to a skeptical outside world, but the Castlemans and the Mellows found a few of the remaining ways to elicit social approbation. Joe Castleman was a married father when he met Joan, a student in his writing class. By marrying him, she provided an after-the-fact rationalization for their moral lapse and impractical elopement. Paul and Roz Mellow met as analyst and patient, and Roz, at least, is aware that she’s in for a dollar:
…as he moved she realized, for the first time, exactly what she had done: She had become her analyst’s lover, and all was irrevocable. He had thrown over everything for her, and the drama of the gesture was so strong that she’d forgotten to wonder whether it was a mistake or not…Sex would save Paul Mellow, but she knew in that moment that in some way it could never save her, could never be as important to her as it was to him. Roz needed to push this idea aside at once, for here they were, bound together in a bed for good. But how could she do that? What, exactly, had she done?
The Mellows eventually go the Castlemans one better. Not only do they marry, they write a cheesy sex manual about their love, have it graphically illustrated, and make it available for mass distribution. Even in a time of stubborn self-determination—the Mellows write their sex book right around the time that Erich Segal comes up with “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”--justifying their secular sin puts a special burden on them. They have to have been right about each other, flamboyantly and unequivocally, putting conventional wisdom to shame for its ties to convention. They have to become sexperts.
In the process of papering over the uncertainty that’s omnipresent for most lovers, the Mellows’ bravado betrays them. Dashiell, their gay son, is “distraught” by what he learns from the book:
The only mention of homosexual love came in a brief section on anal sex, which Dashiell had read again and again. According to his parents, there was a hierarchy of human orifices, and the anus was at the bottom, literally and figuratively, a stingy bit player, used once in a while for variety, but mostly unloved:Though the gays by default do go gaga over this decidedly tricky way of expressing sexual desire, we’re a wee bit puzzled when we hear singing accolades from our own camp…
“The gays!” “A wee bit puzzled!” “Our own camp!” The tone here, unlike almost anywhere else in the book, was hostile and preening.
This tenacious self-righteousness undoes the Mellows not just occasionally, but ultimately, as Roz begins an affair right under Paul’s nose (in an unusually literal sense). This leads to their divorce, which means they have some awkward explaining to do when a hotshot editor wants to reissue the book. As aging divorces who built their careers around their youth and togetherness, Roz and Paul are relatively pathetic figures on the talk-show circuit—and futile cautionary tale for those couples who have already eschewed caution.
