Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

June 21, 2021
In this sage collection of stories, many of which were published in the 1960s and ’70s, Wolitzer (An Available Man) considers love, marriage, and motherhood. The title story is narrated by a woman who regrets her inability to help when she sees a woman with two children having a nervous breakdown in a supermarket. In “Mrs. X,” a housewife receives a note signed from an “anonymous friend" hinting that her husband is having an affair and grows angry at the friend for interfering in their lives. In “Overtime,” a husband and wife allow the former’s needy ex to move in with them temporarily—with unsurprisingly uproarious results. In the affecting “Mother,” a woman who has just given birth worries that something is wrong with her premature baby and leaves the maternity ward to search the hospital for her. Several of the stories revolve around a New York couple, Paulette and Howard; in a contemporary story, the couple must cope with the coronavirus pandemic: “We were going to have a Zoom meeting, whatever that was,” Paulette narrates about a March 2020 book club meeting, her memories undercut with a wistfulness over the devastation that would come in the months to follow. Throughout, Wolitzer captures the feel of each moment with characters who charm with their honesty. The result is a set of engaging time capsules. (Aug.)This review has been updated to more accurately reflect the plot of the story "Mrs. X."

July 15, 2021
Thirteen timeless stories of what goes on between men and women, grounded in an optimism that is no stranger to sorrow. Ninety-one-year-old Wolitzer, author of five novels and mother of Meg, collects for the first time her stories from the 1960s and '70s, many first published in Esquire, Ms., and elsewhere, and adds a brand new one from 2020. A foreword by Elizabeth Strout alerts us to the particular joys of Wolitzer's prose style and storytelling--how she "leaves enough spaces between the lines" for us to "enter the story with our own experiences and therefore make it our own." After the crystalline title story zips us straight back to the mad housewife era and a second introduces the centrality of female desire in Wolitzer's work, there's a run of seven narrated by Paulette, or Paulie as her husband, Howard, calls her. Full of the pleasures of intimacy, these are unusually happy stories about a complicated marriage. No matter that it begins with an unplanned pregnancy; weathers infidelity, an extended visit from Howard's first wife, and the appearance of a sex maniac in the building ("about time," thinks Paulie); and tackles her insomnia and his depression (usually responsive to a day spent driving around to visit model homes). "Why am I so happy?" wonders Paulie. "I know the same bad things Howard knows." Spoiled as we are by the tonic power of Paulie's worldview, it's an adjustment to embrace three grimmer stories that follow. But wait--in an amazing grand finale, Wolitzer brings Paulie and Howard back a half-century later, reckoning with the usual dirty tricks of old age. "Howard, who had once been so gorgeous," is now "grizzled and paunchy and gray," but Paulie is still Paulie: Where she used to check her husband's side of the bed upon waking for "a promising rise in the bedclothes," she now rejoices in the simple evidence of breath. It seemed like the world "would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn't." And along comes the novel coronavirus to do its worst. Completing the trajectory of her early triumphs with a pandemic masterpiece, Wolitzer takes our breath away.

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July 1, 2021
What an array of feelings--psychic paralysis, fear, sympathy, smugness--Wolitzer summons in the provocatively titled titular story that opens this sterling and ambushing retrospective collection reaching back to the 1960s and '70s. Now in her nineties, this author of nine celebrated novels is an artist with a deceptively light touch, creating stories of psychological and social incisiveness that are at once poised and lacerating. Wolitzer deftly reveals how women are harshly judged and how women judge, how children are trapped in their parents' snares and snarls and how they escape. Delectably funny and radically insightful linked stories featuring Paulie and Howard reveal how marriage can be oppressive and freeing, and how a woman's love can move mountains. Writing with startling candor about pregnancy and birth, what it takes to keep oneself and one's family together, and role reversals ("What's so bad about a male sex object, for a change?"), Wolitzer, decorous literary sister to Grace Paley, mother of Meg, closes with a new, deeply moving Paulie and Howard story set in the tragic time of COVID-19. A striking and enlightening gathering of polestar short stories.

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