THE POSITION •
By Meg Wolitzer. Scribner. 307 pp. $24
Several recent novels and TV series have revisited the iconographic suburbs of the Johns (Cheever and Updike) to reveal that marriages can be unhappy there. People cheat! -- and not just dads but moms, too. Readers who fail to be stunned by this news might do well to check out Meg Wolitzer's sly, delicious seventh novel, The Position. In all of her fiction, Wolitzer has shown a supple understanding of how parents try to balance the demands of their children with their own yearnings. Here she deepens that understanding, revealing the ways in which our sexuality and identity are braided with that of our parents -- and our siblings.
The novel's tantalizing premise: In 1975, between PTA meetings, suburbanites Paul and Roz Mellow collaborate on a book that celebrates their own lovemaking. The international bestseller's illustrations show the couple in the entire Kama Sutra catalogue of sexual twists, including "Electric Forgiveness," a position they claim to have invented. "Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment" leaves the four Mellow children warped forever. What's fascinating is that they're warped in such very different ways. The Position tracks the family for three decades, through Paul and Roz's divorce and remarriages, as all of the characters struggle to find love, and themselves.
The oldest Mellow offspring, Holly, is a recovering drug addict with a nursing baby and a stale marriage to an L.A. orthopedic surgeon. The second oldest, Manhattan corporate whiz-kid Michael, suffers from sexual dysfunction as a result of antidepressants. In Providence, R.I., Dashiell, the next-to-youngest, a Republican speechwriter, has just discovered he has Hodgkin's disease -- since he's gay, everyone assumes it's AIDS. And despite flirting with film school, Claudia, the baby of the family, isn't quite anything at all yet. "It was as though she was not fully baked, was still damp in the middle where you stuck in the toothpick to check for doneness."
Dashiell's diagnosis galvanizes the family, as does the news that a publisher wants to reissue a 30th-anniversary edition of "Pleasuring" (with hip new illustrations, of course). Roz, now a Skidmore professor, loves the idea, but Paul, still bitter though on his second remarriage, stonewalls the deal. Michael is dispatched to Paul's Florida retirement community to strong-arm him.
Wolitzer follows the fates not only of the large Mellow crew but also of many of the children's suitors and spouses. The result is a cosmology of matrimony and mating -- with a decidedly Freudian bent. A psychiatrist's daughter, Roz grew up on the grounds of a high-rent mental institution, where, at age 9, she was molested by one of the patients. Paul was in training as a psychoanalyst when he fell in love with his very first patient, Roz, and had to renounce his career for love. Roz muses that "Her marriage to Paul was a response to [her parents' marriage], just the way all marriages are a response to those earlier ones, with corrections made in the flawed texts, only to be corrected again, and yet again, over time." While Wolitzer shows charity toward the sweet hope (or delusion) of first love, she clearly finds marriage's enduring complexities more mysterious.
She doesn't flatten or make short shrift of the male psyche, either. One of the many delightful surprises of The Position is that the husbands here are often more soulful and romantic than their wives. Quietly, Wolitzer shatters a lot of stereotypes (the midlife-crisis man with potbelly and sports car), suggesting that birth order has more of an impact on personality than gender. The "position" in the title is, of course, a pun -- not just sexual position but position in the family. As Roz demands, "How did children raised in the same family end up so different from one another?"
Wolitzer's stance toward her characters is the perfect blend of sympathy and bemusement. She can do a quick, funny sketch as well as anyone. (Roz's "hair, which had lost some of its luster over time, now bore expensive, dark color that gave it the look of highly polished Colonial furniture.") The novel's prose about things sexual is particularly vivid, and infused with too much comedy to ever turn purple. ("He threw himself fully upon her like someone flinging himself into a coffin as it is lowered into the earth.")
In one of the novel's best scenes, Michael's live-in actress-girlfriend betrays him -- with another woman -- while rehearsing, of all things, a scene from an off-Broadway play called "Hysterical Girl," about Freud's famous patient Dora and her affair with nurse Frau K. In the hands of many writers, the set piece, with its complicated references, would arrive with trumpets praising the novelist's postmodern bravado. Wolitzer is more modest than that -- or more confident. Like a good shrink, she lets the characters make their own discoveries.
At one point, Michael complains about his mother: "that combination of hypersensitivity and pushiness -- what could you do with it?" As an authorial presence, Wolitzer is motherly in the best way: engaged, caring, but never intrusive or judgmental. She may love all of the seven children of her novels equally, but The Position is certainly her richest and most substantial. •
Lisa Zeidner's most recent novel is "Layover." She is a professor of English at Rutgers University.
