For Colette, whose signature theme was romantic awakening, even the loss of a cat’s virginity counted as a momentous rite of passage.
“Elle connaît la vie,” Colette noted in a letter: “She knows life.”
“Flowering,” as she called it, was Colette’s lifelong subject, what she considered the “essential drama.” Curious, perhaps, given that she also happened to write one of the great novels of menopause — “Break of Day.” Why limit “flowering” to adolescence, to initiation? Can’t other transitions — menopause, for example, with its own startling varieties of knowledge and transformation — be embraced as a kind of second bloom, an unfurling of a new self?
That sound I hear is the disabused laughter of Sam Raymond, the heroine of Dana Spiotta’s furious and addictive new novel, “Wayward.”
Cloying, consoling banalities, she might say. Look around. Your choices are invisibility or disdain.
Sam is sleepless. Her body burns with hot flashes. Her mind seethes with what she calls her “midlife misogyny” — watching other women capitulate or, worse, try to outpace age on their yoga mats, with their ash-blond balayage highlights. She joins Facebook groups like “Hardcore Hags, Harridans and Harpies” — “a resistance group for women over 50.”
The timing of the “climacteric” — Sam prefers the medical term, more suitably dramatic — comes as its own kind of cruelty. Her body revolts just as her mother is starting to ail and her teenage daughter is growing remote and secretive. Don’t ask about her husband, who thinks Sam is just taking the recent election of Donald Trump “very personally.”
In the time-honored tradition of American protagonists facing a crisis that will require spiritual growth and transformation: Sam Raymond runs away from home.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of July. See the full list. ]
Spiotta has always written about fugitives of one kind or another. Some are very literally on the run — “Eat the Document” features radical activists in hiding — while others are running from themselves, if only in their imaginations or through easy, available transgression. In “Stone Arabia,” a rock musician writes an autobiography envisioning the career he wished he had. The married Mina in “Lightning Field” carries on affairs with two other men.
This energetic space between reality and fantasy life — what Meadow from “Innocents and Others” terms “the mist of the possible,” what Jelly, from the same novel, describes more pessimistically as “the failure of the actual to meet the contours of the imaginary” — this is Spiotta’s kingdom. Her fiction is rightfully praised for its structural innovation, its stylish commentary on technology and “the moment” — but her vision for the novel is fundamentally moral, even traditional.
I diagramed “Wayward” on a paper napkin to show a friend, trying to explain the novel’s hold on me. The lure isn’t just voice or plot. We accompany Sam through her sleepless nights, in her newfound solitude as she restores a majestically crumbling house in another part of town. She sends plaintive text messages to her daughter, calls her mother. She eats a piece of cake. Her mind churns, she scrolls the internet, she listens to the storm of her body.
I ended up scribbling a sort of chain reaction. The movement of the book is essentially a panicked ricochet: how the choices the characters make force choices on other people. One story strand moves forward in time, another carries the reader backward, to see the previous decisions and wounds that inflect each choice. A section takes us back into the history of Syracuse, where the novel is set. Given these countless contingencies, the unseen actions and histories dictating our own, how do we define human freedom? Or safety?
The characters stumble toward questions about the structures holding them — their bodies, homes, identities — wondering how and where to draw their borders. Sam turns out to be an ideal guide. She’s rash, funny, searching, entirely unpredictable, appalled at her own entitlement and ineffectuality — drawn with a kind of skeptical fondness that recalls a Grace Paley line: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”
The local pleasures of Spiotta’s writing are sharp, and many: Sam recalling the narcotic pleasure of holding her daughter as a baby, her painful longing and loneliness for it now. Or smaller moments: the tug of a fork cutting through cake, say, or the vicious infighting in the Hardcore Hags group. So much contemporary fiction swims about in its own theories; what a pleasure to encounter not just ideas about the thing, but the thing itself — descriptions that irradiate the pleasure centers of the brain, a protagonist so densely, exuberantly imagined, she feels like a visitation.
“It was wrecked. It was hers,” Sam thinks of the home she restores herself with pride, marveling at the beauty she can see. Wrecked and hers — the home, the body, the frayed relationship with the town, country. Exasperated, insomniac, ineffective, she scrubs and smokes and thinks, and suddenly, through the clean windows, perceives “a festival of inflected light.”
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Book Review: ‘Wayward,’ by Dana Spiotta - The New York Times
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