The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

Book Overview

From the bestselling author of The Wife and The Position, a feverishly smart novel about female ambition, money, class, motherhood, and marriage-and what happens in one community when a group of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159448354X
• ISBN13: 9781594483547
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Novel with Depth

What a relief to read a book that so clearly and beautifully delineates the differences between men and women. And does so with so many passages and tales that are both funny and yet contain great wisdom on everything from one husband's "informal, condensed seder" to another wife's struggles with the surprises inherent in raising a child with both disabilities and talent. There are some big important "moments," all beautifully rendered. But I also lived for the small pictures that showed so much: The lyrical section on Magritte's wife and model, for example. This is Meg Wolitzer's best and most intricate book yet. May she write many more.

"Not working did not mean that you did nothing."

Meg Wolitzer's "The Ten-Year Nap" focuses on four women who dropped out of the labor force to become full-time mothers. Ten years pass and each of them takes stock of her life and wonders if she made the right decision. Amy Lamb has been married for thirteen years to Leo Buckner, a commercial litigator. They are barely staying afloat financially; Leo's salary just about covers their rent, their son's tuition, and the high cost of everything in Manhattan. Jill Hamlin and her husband, Donald, left New York City for the leafy suburb of Holly Hills. When Jill failed to conceive, the couple adopted a little girl from Siberia who may have developmental problems. Roberta Sokolov lives with her puppeteer husband and their two kids in a walk-up. Her career as a budding painter never materialized, and she uses her talents to help her children create elaborate arts and crafts projects. Karen Tang is a blissful homemaker who worships her successful husband, Wilson Yip, and claims to love not having to work outside the home. She feels this way in spite of her amazing intellectual gifts. Karen is a math whiz who could make a fortune as a statistical analyst; she goes for job interviews every few weeks but never accepts any of the positions offered to her by prestigious firms. Raising a child is an important and fulfilling job, unless you believe that it isn't. Sometimes, spending your time having a bite with the ladies, shopping for asparagus, packing lunches, and listening to your husband tell you about his day can be wearying. When Amy befriends Peggy Ramsey, a beautiful and accomplished museum director, she cannot help but be jealous of this lovely creature who "possessed power in the hard-shelled armed male world." Although Peggy seems to have it all, she also risks it all when she embarks on a reckless love affair. Except for Karen, the stay-at-home moms are stagnating emotionally and fear that they will never manage to reach their full potential. At times, they feel unappreciated and discontented. Using flashbacks, Wolitzer contrasts the lives of her protagonists with those of their mothers before them: Amy's Canadian mom, Antonia, was a progressive thinker and novelist; Jill's mother, Susan, was a severely depressed former actress; Karen's mother toiled in a restaurant kitchen in San Francisco; and Roberta's mother and her husband ran a company that created unusual centerpieces for banquets. Contemporary women have been sold a bill of goods about having it all, but that is a blatant lie, Wolitzer suggests. The "fruits of feminism" have not completely ripened. "Men and women [are] still both evolving," and it might take another generation or even longer for true equality of the sexes to become the norm. In an eloquent passage, Amy's mother declares: "We were the early ones. I know we got some things wrong, but we did try to do right by everyone. And now I guess it's out of our hands." The author gets many things right. Her prose is precise and ca

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I can't say enough great things about the Ten Year Nap. It is, foremost, a terrific read--fascinating, funny, riveting, and entertaining. But it is more than that, too: it is a provocative look at what it's like to be a mother today: is it possible to fulfill one's obligations to family and still have an interesting, meaningful life? This is the important subject of this book. I really loved The Ten Year Nap (and I'm not a mother).