Meg Wolitzer's The Ten Year Nap is a thought provoking novel about career women who become mothers and the choices that they make. It is a very smart novel about feminism and family, and not a light read.
The novel focuses on four New York women, friends, who have each made different choices when it comes to career versus family. For the last ten years, most of their lives have been focused on family: children and marriage. Some of the novel is focused on their own mothers and the choices they also made, and the paths they tried to open for their daughters. They all went to college and became career women: lawyer, film producer, banker and artist. But for each of them, family changed the path. Now that ten years have passed, their children are older, they are approaching 40...what is next?
This novel asks the question, "Can we really have it all?" Can women have careers and be wonderful mothers and focused on family? As a stay at home mom, who is college educated and had a career prior to having children, I thought this novel would be right up my alley. I was wrong. I found it very difficult to connect to the women in this book. First of all, the New York city life is so different from the suburban life that I am living that I could not relate as much to their daily activities. Secondly, all but one of them is not exactly happy being a just a Mom. I absolutely hate that saying...'just a Mom.' It implies that being a Mom is not enough. As I read the novel, I believe the author was saying just that. Being a Mom is not enough. Women should be doing more, should expect more of themselves than to just be a Mom. Finally, I felt that three of the main characters were a bit whiny and self-absorbed. One has a hard time loving her adoptive daughter, one wants to keep up with the other mothers at the school so she is creating stress in the home as her husband struggles to pay the bills and provide for the family, one feels that she has lost in her creative ability and feels the need to be an activist so that she is doing something "important" (because raising her two children isn't?) then she completely abandons the teenager she is helping in her activism.
There was another reason that made it difficult to connect with the characters. Roberta, the character who needed to be involved in some sort of activism chose abortion as her cause. She volunteers for an organization that provides transportation to girls who want an abortion but do not have the means to get to a clinic. She flies out to the Midwest to complete this task. She takes the girl to the abortion (with consent from the girl's mother) and then cares for her overnight and drives her back home (in the process she confesses to the girl that she too had an abortion when she was younger and that she hardly ever thinks about it). I found this turn of events so unnecessary and unbelievable. I cannot imagine that a mother would allow a stranger to take her only daughter to get an abortion and then to care for her overnight in a hotel room. Work responsibilities or not. I also found it very difficult to believe that a mother of two children would not think about the one that she aborted in her younger life. I felt that this was the author's way of making a political statement and that the only thing it added to character development was to make this character less likable. Roberta promises to help this girl with her art career by showing slides of the teenager's to some of her New York art connections (of which she doesn't have any anymore). After a few communications, Roberta completely drops the ball and never reaches out to this young girl again. It absolutely disgusted me.
There would be a lot to discuss with this novel, so I would recommend it for a book club especially one interested in feministic literature. For me, it was not a hit. I came away angry. Maybe because I do not consider myself a feminist and do not understand the need for feminism, this novel did not resonate with me. It was a very intelligent book, well written and provocative. I do believe that the author did her job, because even though I did not like this novel, it did elicit an emotion. It just may not have been the emotion she intended to evoke.
Happy Reading!
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