The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 August 2013
by Meg Wolitzer
Growing up in an odd family can feel like a long hangover from the oddities of childhood. The thing is, all families are odd in some way or another; or, at least, we think of our own as strange. This novel is about one such odd family, the four children of the two authors of a 1970s sex manual modeled on the famous (and infamous) The Joy of Sex. What would it be like to be those kids? Embarrassing, of course, and it would be likely to skew one's early understanding of sex and relationships. That is the basic pretense of this engrossing novel. It is 25 years after the first publication of The Book, Pleasuring, and the publishers want to put out a new edition. But now the authors are long-separated and Roz and Paul Mellow don't agree whether it should be done. Their story closely parallels the tale of The Joy of Sex and its later republication. The story of their children is more involved. We meet Claudia, Dashiell, Michael and Holly Mellow. Each of them has a different memory of the day they discovered the book on their parents' bookshelf. Each of them has grown up with their own divergent lives and personal problems. One is bad body self-image, another suffers from sexual disfunction from the use of anti-depressants, one resents the lack of homosexual guidance in the book, and another is alienated from the family. Wolitzer does a brilliant job describing characters with complex issues, and their unique set of memories. Indeed, their stories are steeped in evocative memory. The author is an excellent story-teller, weaving emotion and the immediacies of modern life together. There is, of course, a lot of talk of sex in this book. But it is adult in the best sense of the word. Wolitzer is blunt and honest about the place sex has in our lives. It is as if she is saying "look, let's just be frank and sincere about sex, and here's a story about how it affects this cast of characters." Sex scenes are explicit without titillation. There is a refreshing matter-of-fact tone to her writing, which is insightful and open. A very good book. And like any good book, it is about Time, the passage of Time, love and the inevitability of change.