The wives

I updated my Goodreads page – are you my Goodreads friend?  You should be! – with a book I picked up in a used bookstore during lunch yesterday: The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer.  (Meg Wolitzer also wrote The Uncoupling, which I quite enjoyed.)

When I searched Goodreads for this book, the following books came up in this order:

1.  The Time Traveler’s Wife
   by Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Pilot’s Wife
   by Anita Shreve
3. The Kitchen God’s Wife
   by Amy Tan
4. The 19th Wife
   by David Ebershoff
5. The Paris Wife
   by Paula McLain
6. The Zookeeper’s Wife
   by Diane Ackerman
7. The Canterbury Tales: Pardoner’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale
   by Geoffrey Chaucer
8. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
   by Oliver Sacks
9. The Tiger’s Wife
   by Téa Obreht
10. Ahab’s Wife, or The Star-Gazer
    by Sena Jeter Naslund
11. The Senator’s Wife
    by Sue Miller
12. The Twentieth Wife
    by Indu Sundaresan
13. The Doctor’s Wife
    by Elizabeth Brundage
14. The Starter Wife
    by Gigi Levangie Grazer
15. The Wife
    by Meg Wolitzer

Holy cow.

A confession that will not surprise you: for some time before the evidence was laid out so plainly before me, I was both fascinated and alarmed by the number of titles I’d encountered that had the format of “<masculine name or noun>’s wife”.  Likewise “<masculine name or noun>’s daughter.”  When browsing, I reach for these books immediately.  Often as not, I put them back.  In many cases, these titles portend an exploration of what it is like to be the helpmate of an important man, both utterly crucial to the man’s success and utterly secondary to it.  I support this; I’ve wanted to explore this dynamic myself, fascinated by a couple of widows who completed the editing and publication of their philsopher-husbands’ work.  But the sheer volume of titles with this construction seems counterproductive, like the only stories that get on best-seller lists are those about women playing second (or nineteenth.  Or first of many).

I do like Wolitzer’s variation of this: the book is indeed about a woman coming to terms with a lifetime of deferring her own writing to help her author-husband achieve fame and fortune, but it’s not called “The Author’s Wife” or “The Helsinki Prize-winner’s Wife.”  That’s something, I guess.

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