Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon randomly caught my eye. I’d never heard of the author or the book before deciding to read it, but it looked interesting. Mostly I read it because I’d been hanging out in juvfic/YA land for too long and figured that I should at least pretend to be grown up and read something in the adult section for a change.
What’s it about?
Wife 22 follows Alice Buckle, a forty-four year old woman who is deeply unhappy. Her marriage has become a chore. Her children are pulling away from her. She feels small and important because her playwriting career crashed just as it was getting started. She has reached the age that her mother was when she died, and as a result feels unmoored. When she unexpectedly receives an email asking her to join an anonymous survey about married people and married life, she signs up and becomes “Wife 22.” As Wife 22, Alice confides everything to Researcher 101: her worries about her children, her disappointment in her marriage, the difference between her romantic expectations and her reality, her favorite foods and stories, her secret shames… As the survey goes on, Alice and her researcher grow closer, because it turns out that having someone really listen is aphrodisiacal.
What’d I think?
I really like it when stories about relationships get into the important stuff and treat long-term relationships as something real: they’re not fairy tales, but they’re not something to be immediately discarded the moment they become difficult. Gideon does this very well. Alice’s present day narration and her survey responses do an excellent job of juxtaposing the slog of middle age and a decades-long marriage with the breathless romance of new love. I feel like a lot of relationships in fiction are treated as either idyllic or the absolute worst, and I always appreciate a depiction that falls in the middle.
Alice trying to figure out her life/priorities
Alice is a compelling protagonist. She can be overbearing and a bit ridiculous—at one point she pretends to inspect her son for lice in order to check the direction of his hair swirl to determine if he is gay; at another she has a group of elementary schoolers sing a goose-themed cover of Katy Perry’s “California Girls” in a production of Charlotte’s Web—but she feels very real throughout. Even when she is making mistakes, she is sympathetic. But she’s not the only well-done character. Her husband and both her children have their own problems and storylines. I’m personally more interested in in Alice’s friends than her family, though. She also has a good support system in her best friend Nedra (a divorce lawyer whose impending nuptials to her long-time parter provides an interesting counterpoint to Alice’s marital woes) and mentor Bunny (who helped Alice with her playwriting back in the day). She also has a group of other women who lost their mothers and who alone understand how much she struggles with the knowledge that she is about to hit the age at which she lived loner than her mother. I don’t know if I’ve just been reading the wrong books or if complex, compelling middle-aged women are underrepresented in fiction but I found the women in Wife 22 refreshing.
I was initially a little wary because I was worried that Wife 22 would take the easy route out and have Alice throw her marriage away in exchange for a shiny new boyfriend, but that’s not how it goes. Gideon treats Alice and William’s marriage delicately. Both parties are at fault for the current situation. Both have made mistakes, but both deserve better. William is not a disposable husband for Alice to toss aside for a forbidden romance. Wife 22 is better than that. The ending is satisfying, but it also took me totally by surprise. I like being surprised.
The writing style is interesting. It is a combination of Alice’s first-person narration, Facebook interactions, emails, Alice’s responses to survey questions, Google results, and events written out like a screenplay. The switching format is engaging, though I have to say I wasn’t entirely sold on the survey sections. While it is admittedly interesting to attempt to guess what kinds of questions Alice is answering, it is also a little frustrating. Pro tip: the questions can be found in the appendix if you, like me, wanted to understand the context for Alice’s more vague answers.
What’s the verdict?
I enjoyed Wife 22. It was a quick, easy read with compelling characters. I particularly liked the fact that it had several round middle-aged female characters, which in my experience is a rarity. I also liked the honest depiction of long-term relationships and the difficulty of real connection in a world full of responsibilities and distractions. It is not a book I would necessarily shout about from the rooftops, but I definitely enjoyed reading it and think that fans of contemporary novels and messy romances would find it well worth their time.
Report card
Characters: A
Plot: B
Writing: B+
Themes: A
Overall: A
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