Love and healing beat the odds in Waldman's poignant novel
LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS, by Ayelet Waldman. Doubleday. 340 pages. $23.95.
By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 5, 2006
Emilia Greenleaf has always prided herself on being a tough woman: proud, independent and sexy. She met and married the man of her dreams, Jack Woolf, a successful lawyer who is also kind and sensitive and handsome.
But now everything is wrong. Emilia must steel herself just to leave the house. She falls to pieces daily, in public places, with no warning. Jack's son, William, is a precocious little know-it-all, which is no wonder. William's mother is a neurotic ex-wife who seems hell-bent on exposing Emilia for the fraud of a stepmother that Emilia knows herself to be.
None of this would pierce Emilia so thoroughly had she not just lost her baby, her perfect Isabel, to SIDS during Isabel's very first night on earth.
Ayelet Waldman's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the story of Emilia picking up the pieces, of how she and Jack try to rebuild their marriage from within the ruins of their grief. Most of all, it is about learning to love little William, "this scrawny know-it-all of a boy, with his irritating precocity and his embarrassingly cloistered and self-centered view of the world." In so doing, Emilia is able to achieve what she would not have thought possible: healing.
This is a wonderful book, engaging and startlingly honest.
Waldman is perhaps best known as a wife and mother. Her column in the online magazine Slate and her occasional essays for The New York Times focus almost exclusively on her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, and their four children.
Even a cursory skim of these and her "Bad Mother" blog offer such a personal look into her family that you feel as if you are invading their privacy; you become privy to secrets that seem like, well, none of your business. So I suppose it is only natural that our window into Emilia's world is so stunningly clear, and that Waldman's insights into this character are so authentic.
Emilia is relentlessly reflective, policing herself to the point of paralysis. She is selfish and childish in her grief, and she knows it. She throws tantrums, lashes out unfairly at people who love her -- and then, compounding the anguish that caused the outburst in the first place, she is racked with guilt at having done so.
As a result - and this is to Waldman's credit -- I don't like Emilia; at times I feel trapped in her head, stuck like a gerbil on a wheel of self-loathing and sadness that's going nowhere. Still, the story is so compelling -- her grief is so real and so raw -- that you stick by her almost out of loyalty.
And it's worth it. When the fog starts to clear, you, too, feel as if you've received the gift of a second chance and that love may not be such an impossible pursuit after all.
