08/08/2022
In these skillfully crafted short stories, Wineberg (Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life) spotlights middle-aged, urban heterosexuals with recurrent themes of aging parents, unsatisfying marriages, adultery, divorce, and the yearning for passion, all accented with crisp, wry dialogue that expounds on the “artifacts” of life’s shattered expectations. Wineberg does not shy away from life’s messes, and the protagonists’ meditative reveries elicit equal feelings of sympathy and reflection throughout the collection: “I always believed marriage should be ‘until death do you part,’” one character observes. “But maybe the death is of illusions.”
The first half of the book is uneven, with characters and storylines tending to blur into each other, and though names and occupations change, Wineberg overall favors loosely plotted stories that cultivate a similar atmosphere. One after another, middle-class female protagonists—many with Jewish backgrounds—encounter “free-floating dissatisfaction” with their husbands, taking lovers or facing infidelity; alternatively, several dispirited women navigate messy divorces and plunge into the world of after-50 dating. Wineberg’s tendency toward uniformity in these stories lessens the collection’s accessibility, notably in a scene where a hard-to-believe gay character seriously entertains the idea of enjoying “a normal life” with a woman.
By contrast, the second half of the collection hums with energy and originality. In the sharply funny “Double Helix,” a woman’s ex-husband sends her a copy of his autobiographical first novel, which is dedicated to her, but erases her from his life. The protagonist in “The Feather Pillow” searches for a legacy while hurrying to pry memories from her mother, a Holocaust survivor who will relate only one, probably fabricated, story about a German jail. In “Woman Wanted for Travel—No Romance,” an octogenarian widower (the book’s sole male protagonist) proposes to his elderly female traveling companion but concedes, “I don’t know if what we have is affection or gratitude”—a sentiment that Wineberg revisits throughout this thoughtful read.
Takeaway: A reflective collection focused on marriage, infidelity, and starting over.
Great for fans of: Meg Wolitzer and Cathleen Schine
Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: NA Editing: B+ Marketing copy: B+
2022-12-22
A collection of short stories explores marriage, fidelity, restlessness, and desire.
Each of this volume’s 14 tales features female protagonists, many of whom are in their 60s. The opening story, “Framing the Picture,” is a meditation on life and death, focusing on a woman whose husband goes through emotional changes when his mother falls ill. The couple decide to take her and her companion into their home, which leads to a stark reevaluation of their own relationship. The following tale, “Hurricane,” introduces Alice, a social worker and writer, and Douglas, a university history professor, a married couple whose lives begin to take divergent paths. When Alice’s affair with an aspiring healer fails to provide the comfort in life she is missing, she considers a drastic exit strategy. In “Sleuth,” Helen begins a relationship with a married man and, despite being in love with him, tries online dating in her quest for companionship in New York City. Meanwhile, in “Artifacts,” a 67-year-old woman also joins a dating website and attempts to navigate the “labyrinth” of possible relationships. Wineberg creates psychologically realistic characters by delivering concise, revealing glimpses into their psyches: Helen “felt adrift, constructing a new life, facing the visceral realization that there was more time behind her than ahead.” The author is keenly observant, and the collection is punctuated with many fine descriptive passages: “An old, bent woman with gray hair, who hobbles with a cane and wears a long brown raincoat and black orthopedic shoes, clumsy as boats.” But despite being well crafted, the stories prove thematically repetitive. “Framing the Picture” and “We Worry About the Wrong Things” deal with parental illness and “Sleuth” and “Artifacts,” with online dating. This allows Wineberg to approach such subjects from a variety of angles, but the tales often read like scant reworkings of the same plot. Even with regard to description, in which the author often excels, character sketches can also prove repetitive, with a reliance on adjectives like bulky. The collection lacks the necessary variation to maintain readers’ attention. Wineberg is a skilled writer, and this book may well appeal to women facing similar challenges, but in terms of scope, it misses the mark.
These tales offer unquestionably sharp writing, but they repeatedly go over similar ground.
