Rating: 
Summary: Elegant Brevity
Review: "The Wife" is the first selection of my bookclub, and a fine choice it was. This slim novel is one of the finest examples of literary fiction available. Ms. Wolitzer's prose is spare, clean and elegant. She doesn't employ gimmicks such as incomprehensible syntax or run-on sentences. She has no need to imitate Jonathan Franzen and give us an encyclopedic novel. While the subjects of marriage, gender, ambition and art loom large, the author packages them tidily into the voice of Joan Castleman, the protagonist and narrator. Ms. Wolitzer imbues the 64-year-old Joan with a quiet intelligence, a refreshing feminist heroine who doesn't spew trite feminist messages. Her life is believable to the very end. (One reviewer found the "unexpected" ending anything but. I think most readers of literary fiction are prepared for the possibility of this particular conclusion.) The only cavil with this novel is the repetition in some paragraphs. "Woman in a man's world" appears in variations throughout the work, but is fitting for a character not versed in feminist lexicon. This aside, I truly enjoyed this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Wit, warmth, and wisdom
Review: A marriage based on a secret does not bode well for longevity, but this one lasted long enough for Joan, the wife of a successful writer and her former married, creative-writing professor, to sit back in her first-class airline seat and take a good long look at just what she traded for when she married the man.
This diabolically funny and wicked book is a rant of sorts against the literary establishment, gender, status, and fame. Excellent summer read - also excellent for autumn, winter, and spring reading, as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to Tarnish
Review: Anatole Broyard once wrote "A Literary Reputation is hard to tarnish." I think this axiom might apply both to Wolitzer's latest novel as a work of writing as well as to her narrative about the relationship between a famous writer and his long-suffering wife. Although the novel was quite easy to read and clearly wrought with intelligence, it never really achieves literary three dimensionality except for a lovely section that takes place at Smith College during the 1950's. Here is the major problem with the book. To deliver the final twist, the author has to impose a gag order on her first person narrator. This mean that this narrator, who turns to be a world-class writer (something we don't learn until the end), cannot gives us the sense that she is a writer, that she thinks about details and plot ideas, that she overhears conversations and makes note of them. You see, real writers have a very refined take on the world and spend their lives gilding this sensibility. So when we find out that the wife is really writing the books, we don't really believe it (because there has been NO real sense of it at all in her on stage personality) and we then think she's a fool for letting her husband not only become so self-indulgent but also walk all over her. After all she's euphemistically wearing the pants, isn't she? Meanwhile, her husband is a philanderer, obsessed with winning prizes, with being at the top of the literary heap; he's only intermittently interested in his children. He's pretty awful and we have to spend a whole novel with him, only to find out that he's a total sham, that his wife has been writing his books! Oy vey! And you think to yourself, well, if his philandering right in front of her was so painful for her, why didn't she threaten to pull the plug and refuse to keep writing his books for him? That certainly would've kept him in line. Not doing this makes her seem so incredibly weak. I could go on, but what's the point. (Sigh). This is fun to read. It's entertaining, but it is NOT serious. Wolitzer seems to have been publishing steadily since she was very young. Somebody -- her friends, her editors -- is not holding the mirror up to her. I read it in one gulp but it was a great disappointment to me, alas
Rating:
Summary: Hard to Tarnish
Review: Anatole Broyard once wrote "A Literary Reputation is hard to tarnish." I think this axiom might apply both to Wolitzer's latest novel as a work of writing as well as to her narrative about the relationship between a famous writer and his long-suffering wife. Although the novel was quite easy to read and clearly wrought with intelligence, it never really achieves literary three dimensionality except for a lovely section that takes place at Smith College during the 1950's. Here is the major problem with the book. To deliver the final twist, the author has to impose a gag order on her first person narrator. This mean that this narrator, who turns to be a world-class writer (something we don't learn until the end), cannot gives us the sense that she is a writer, that she thinks about details and plot ideas, that she overhears conversations and makes note of them. You see, real writers have a very refined take on the world and spend their lives gilding this sensibility. So when we find out that the wife is really writing the books, we don't really believe it (because there has been NO real sense of it at all in her on stage personality) and we then think she's a fool for letting her husband not only become so self-indulgent but also walk all over her. After all she's euphemistically wearing the pants, isn't she? Meanwhile, her husband is a philanderer, obsessed with winning prizes, with being at the top of the literary heap; he's only intermittently interested in his children. He's pretty awful and we have to spend a whole novel with him, only to find out that he's a total sham, that his wife has been writing his books! Oy vey! And you think to yourself, well, if his philandering right in front of her was so painful for her, why didn't she threaten to pull the plug and refuse to keep writing his books for him? That certainly would've kept him in line. Not doing this makes her seem so incredibly weak. I could go on, but what's the point. (Sigh). This is fun to read. It's entertaining, but it is NOT serious. Wolitzer seems to have been publishing steadily since she was very young. Somebody -- her friends, her editors -- is not holding the mirror up to her. I read it in one gulp but it was a great disappointment to me, alas
Rating: 
Summary: From the male perspective
Review: Because of my business (author) and genre (relationships) I try to keep up with books marketed to women. Meg Wolitzer's book "The Wife" gave me perspectives I hadn't even dreamed of before. From a literary point of view the book was outstanding; but its energy is what I found captivating. It "almost" makes me want to begin writing fiction. Butch Mazzuca, author "From the First Date to the Bedroom, the Single Man's Official Guide to Success with Women."
Rating:
Summary: Great Portrayl
Review: I absolutley thought this book nailed it on the head. Wolizter made my laugh, cry, and think.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent literary fiction
Review: I feel so strongly about this book. All who love intelligent fiction with vibrant prose should read it.
Rating:
Summary: The Wife
Review: I found this book to be extremely well-written with great descriptives... The author takes you on a tale of a marriage and it's demise with a couple of little shockers at the end... After a while I had a hard time putting this book down. This was a very good book and was refreshingly different from other books I have read that may explore similar issues...
Rating:
Summary: this is why i read
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I loved the author's witty, dry, slightly acidic tone throughout. I loved the character of The Wife. I can imagine sitting down and having a good gab with her over a glass of wine or four. The book is well written and I didn't want to put it down. That's always a good sign.
Rating:
Summary: I was troubled by the ending ...
Review: I thought that this novel was pretty good, but I did have some problems with it. First of all, the narrator struck me as quite a misandric (that is, man-hating) person. One might say that it wasn't men in general, but just perhaps her own husband specifically or men in her own particular field, but I got the sense she she pretty much disliked all men, through and through. Also I was troubled by the surprise ending for two reasons. One is that I thought that it was unusual to have a suprise ending in a first-person narrative book. It's as if the author is telling us a story, and in the first 98% of the story, she is interweaving all the facts of her life together with her opinions on the relationships between men and women in general and on the relationship betwen her and her husband in particular. Then, in the last 2% of the story, she decides to add in one more significant fact that, for no discernible reason, she withheld from us for the first 98%. (I say "no discernible reason" from the standpoint of the narrator, not from the standpoint of the actual author of the book.) This is not, after all, a mystery novel or a whodunit. Had the reader been made aware of this fact, it would have cast a whole different light on much of the first 98% of the book. Some might say that this "Sixth Sense" aspect of the book of exactly one of its virtues. However, I felt that if this woman (that is, the narrator, not the author) is telling me a story and is interspersing her views on life, on marriage, on the relationship between the sexes and so forth, I would have appreciated being dealt a full deck of cards WHILE being told the story so that I could more appropriately evaluate this woman's worldview and decide whether I not I could see where she was coming from and whether or not I could empathize or sympathize with her thoughts. I believe, in trying to consider the author's life and life choices in retrospect, knowing what I know now, her choices seem more unwise and less understandable than they did while reading the novel. I know that some may say that, in evaluating Joan's choices, it is important to keep history in perspective (i.e. the relationship between the sexes in the late 50's and early 60's, when Joan and Joe were still young), but I still feel that her decisions were odd given what we know by the end. And even if one could explain away her actions as a woman in her 20's, it gets harder and harder to do so, as she becomes older and wiser.
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