'Nap' drifts off into fuzzy characters Review: 'The Ten-Year Nap' by Meg Wolitzer

FICTION | Wolitzer's latest is aimless

They sign on for "playdates" and push Sherman tank-like strollers through parks. They surrender good jobs for full-time mothering duties.

Meg Wolitzer's eighth novel, The Ten-Year Nap (Riverhead, 368 pages, $24.95), examines these dutiful soldiers in the ongoing mommy wars, following several nonworking women hovering around the age of 40. Some, like ex-lawyer Amy Lamb, are situated in affluent Manhattan splendor; one remains nestled in a suburban enclave, friendless with the locals but reaching out to a starry-eyed young woman through e-mail. All are supported financially and emotionally by their husbands, which include a hard-working attorney whose "daytime universe was now as foreign to her as the enclosure of anyone else's world" and a television reporter in his 50s who performs puppet shows on the weekends. Penny Ramsey, the one character here who can balance work and family, requires a strapping picture framer for afternoon sex because her husband "is so totally corporate now."

What's surprising is that these women aren't particularly distinct characters. Save for Amy Lamb, some of the dialogue could have been easily transposed to another character. This glaring flaw has much to do with the book's aimless narrative. At times, the novel feels as if the complex couple from Wolitzer's previous novel, The Wife, had been rudely ushered into a cloning chamber, emerging after the zap as an unruly ensemble in search of an exit, with Wolitzer sewing these Frankenstein parts into a makeshift social satire. It doesn't help that Wolitzer draws attention to these unfulfilled ambitions with minichapters featuring these women at earlier points in their lives, or that these flashbacks also include awkward cameo appearances from Margaret Thatcher and Georgette Magritte.

Wolitzer's novels have always worked well when her characters are thrown into a provocative scenario. (Her previous novel, The Position, showed Wolitzer's panache for comic embarrassment.) But with Nap's characters stuck in park, Wolitzer has no place to go when she slams on the gas.

Edward Champion is a New York-based free-lance writer.