I wanted to love Ayelet Waldman's new book,
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, because I enjoy her column at
Salon. Ms. Waldman is quite the controversial figure at Salon. In one column, she said she hoped her son would be gay. In another column, she wrote about over-zealous "attachment" parents. She has written about abortion and suicide. These are the sorts of topics that apparently get people - even supposedly enlightened Salon readers - up in arms.
I've never been offended by one of her columns or written in a letter to call her a "hack" for writing about her own experiences, rather than quoting psychologists and book authors. These people obviously don't understand the difference between an editorial column and a researched article.
I'll defend Waldman's column and her right to make her own choices all day long. But her novel? I'm not sure.
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the story of New Yorker Emilia, who has recently lost a baby girl. She "stole" her husband away from another woman, and he has a smartypants 5-year-old son William from the previous marriage. Emilia is responsible for the boy for one afternoon out of the week, and their hatred for each other seems mutual, especially since he spouts horrible comments (fed to him by his mother) about his dead half-sister.
But Emilia and William inevitably bond, mostly over their shared love for Central Park. That's not a spoiler because
of course they do. We've seen this plotline a thousand times. Gruff adult hates precocious child, child charms adult, adult almost loses child, adult realizes he/she loves child. Think
Big Daddy or even
Savannah Smiles (anyone remember that movie?).
Still, Waldman does it well. The characters feel like real people. Emilia lies to herself, wallows in misery, misinterprets, and sometimes acts like a spoiled brat. And Waldman has four children, so it's not surprising that she paints William so perfectly. Narrator Ellen Reilly helped preserve the reality of William because the voice she did for him was perfect, childlike but with the perfect hint of smart-kid snobbery. He's a child smart beyond his years - at 3, he could recognize an anatomically incorrect stuffed dinosaur - and because of it, Emilia assigns him motives more cunning than a 5-year-old can manage. Emotionally, he is still a child, and Emilia has to realize that to fully set aside her animosity toward him.
In a book like this, where you can anticipate the outcome, it's not the ending that matters but the journey. Still, that left me without much to look forward to to keep me speeding toward the end. Though this is an abridged version, it still read slowly and dragged in the middle. I like the book, especially thinking back on it, but unlike the best books, I wasn't sad when the last CD ended.
