Review: Meg Wolitzer’s ‘The Uncoupling’

As our 10-year-old wars in Afghanistan and Iraq bleed into a new conflict in Libya, maybe we could use something more creative than “the surge” to bring peace. For the weary women in Aristophanes’ ancient comedy “Lysistrata,” the answer was an anti-surge: a sex strike until the men lay down their arms. It worked 2,400 years ago — in the bawdy Greek play — but in the theatre of foreign policy, America has perfected a method of prosecuting foreign wars without inconveniencing most of its citizens. If we’re not going to give up shopping, we’re certainly not going to give up sex.

Those distant wars provide the faint political backdrop for Meg Wolitzer’s romantic comedy “The Uncoupling.” It’s set in Stellar Plains, N.J., a stellar suburban community where the new drama teacher is directing a production of “Lysistrata.” For a first-year teacher at a public high school, that seems about as likely as a sixth-grade production of “Hair.” (In my high school, we had to change the lyrics of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” to “Propane,” but that was the Midwest.) In any case, this isn’t the only element of magic that Wolitzer introduces into her charming novel about love gone stale.

"The Uncoupling: A Novel" by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead. 271 pp. $25.95)

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In the opening pages, an enervating spell falls over the women of Stellar Plains, sapping their libido and making them realize they never want to be touched again. “The spell had started to come over all of them,” Wolitzer writes, “seizing them in their separate beds, changing them in an instant. Starting that night, and continuing for quite a while afterward, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped and the windows shook like crazy in their frames, and all over that town, you could hear the word ‘no.’ ”

Of course, nice suburban people don’t talk about their sex lives, so even as rehearsals for “Lysistrata” continue through this long, cold winter, nobody makes the connection between Aristophanes’ comedy and the little tragedies playing out in bedrooms all over town. For Wolitzer, though, it’s a chance to eavesdrop on what’s not gettin’ down, and she uses these boudoirs of quiet desperation as a way of framing her witty commentary on the challenge of keeping romance alive.

At the center of the novel are Dory and Robby Lang, happily married, popular teachers whose sex life has evaporated like a summer puddle. “Under the power of the spell,” Wolitzer writes, “all Dory could think was that sleeping with your husband after so many years was not at all like sleeping with him when you were young. It was no longer effortless; it was full of effort.” Robby and his wife never talk about it — the change comes on so suddenly — but the whole structure of their marriage begins to strain. “Sexlessness had awakened some churlishness in him,” Dory realizes. “Was this all it took in order to find a bad side of a man? Was it like depriving him of an essential nutrient?”

Wolitzer moves through the lives of other women at school, filling out the range of romantic experiences, maybe just a little too schematically. There’s the chubby college counselor whose husband cruelly notes, “You’ve really let yourself go”; the gorgeous school psychologist, who enjoys juggling several partners at once; the ex-lesbian gym teacher, who’s raising three demanding boys; and Dory’s shy teenage daughter, who’s experiencing the first stirrings of love. Under the cold hand of this strange spell, they all realize they’ve had enough. One by one, night after night, young and old, they turn aside, like “Manchurian Candidates of midlife married abstinence.”