[Riverhead; 2011]
by Nika Knight
Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling is a moralistic tale about sexual boredom, an attempt at humor and wit in depicting The Way We Live Now. In it, Wolitzer tries to link several different themes – sexual ennui in the marriage bed; middle age; teenagers and the internet; the internet and everyone’s sex life — but based as it is on a shaky, misplaced foundation, I’m not sure it succeeds at making any larger point at all.
The story takes place largely in a high school in a fictional town in suburban New Jersey, revolving around the lives of several teachers and their students. The fairytale-like conceit of the novel is a spell that has the effect of causing women to lose interest in sex, and it takes over the town. The spell is somehow linked to the new drama teacher’s production of Aristophene’s Lysistrata – a bawdy comedy about the relationship between the sexes, in which the women of Sparta withhold sex from men in an attempt to end Peloponnesian war.
Underlying the parable about sexual apathy is Wolitzer’s strange assumptions about technology – she spends much of the first half of the novel drawing a link between the hyper-connectedness of the internet age and a growing lack of intimacy in our personal lives. The novel assumes a winking comaraderie with the reader on this point; as though we will nod in poignant recognition as Wolitzer describes how the internet has replaced meaningful connections (like sex) with superfluous ones (like email). I’m thinking particularly of a moment in which she alludes to email being a pseudosexual experience: Dory, a high school teacher and one of the main characters in the book, wonders aloud to her husband,
“I hear that little ping whenever an email’s just come in, and my heart speeds up. I actually get all excited, you know? What is that?”… In Dory’s inbox at that very moment…was a message from a friend, signed “xoxox,” like many e-mails between women. Even the most casual female aquaintances tossed around x’s and o’s in a promiscuous display of intimacy.
At points, the book even alludes to a belief that exposure to the internet has erased “sexual innocence” in young lovers. Dory thinks this over:
…the intimacy of love well, that had often been traded in for something far more public and open. What had happened to sexual shyness? She wondered, picturing herself in her parents’ house in Brooklyn, knowing nothing, having never seen a naked man, and being shocked nearly to the point of aneurysm when a boy put her hand on his lap at a party. Sexual shyness and lack of information—they were gone.
The concept of “sexual shyness,” while it’s mentioned only briefly and, in the passage above, in the context of an adult character’s struggle to get past what she realizes to be her own out-of-datedness, is still – strangely — only alluded to as a quality that women might have. The over-abundancy of information and the resulting lack of “shyness” around sex is reiterated later in the book, but again in the context of it being a girl who is not shy or unknowledgeable about sex. She encounters a penis for the first time: “…he nodded gravely and cast his eyes downward toward his fly, which he unzipped with a loud single syllable, revealing an anotomical part that was pretty much as Marissa expected, since she and her friends had been studying them online since seventh grade.”
Nostalgia for an era of women’s ignorance about sex and sexuality feels bizarrely regressive. On a personal level, I found the novel’s brief lament for a time in which lack of knowledge about sex and sexuality was normal to be disappointing, as well as a little bit disturbing.
And back to Wolitzer’s more general point — is technology the death of intimacy? Does the internet have an effect on how we conduct our personal lives? To be honest, I don’t think it does, and definitely not in the way that Wolitzer seems to think. If she’d brought up something like relationship statuses on Facebook I think she may have had a small point to make, but strangely, Wolitzer doesn’t approach the real ways in which we can now bring our personal lives online. There is an invented Second Life-type universe that the kids like to take part in, in The Uncoupling, but there are no allusions to Twitter, to Facebook – to any kind of social media at all. Wolitzer’s greatly misunderstood what it’s like to be on and experience the internet, while simultaneously reacting to the medium as it was in about 2003. The depiction of technology and its effect on our relationships is so awkwardly misplaced, it’s hard to move past it.
And so Wolitzer’s attempts at satire and wit are based on what feels like a false assumption about contemporary experience. The results feel awkward and strange, as in this passage:
“Someone likes you,” Bev had said, lifting a frozen drink to her lips. Women always needed this kind of drink; maybe life thrust them down so far, Leanne thought, that they needed something bright and sweet in order to lift them back up. These seemed a parallel to how women always needed to sit together in restaurants, pulling apart white-meat chicken and leafy greens like raptors.
It’s hard for me to unravel what’s meant to be humor or satire here, and as a result I wonder if the passage above is meant to be an accurate depiction of women – that we are groups of predators appeasing ourselves with fruity drinks and sparsely-caloried dinners. These awkward, misguided moments become further roadblocks in understanding what ultimate truth the book was hoping to reach.
There are, however, occasional brief glimpses of actual humor – short interludes that suddenly expose Wolitzer’s potential as a writer, and what kind of book this could have been. Sentences like this one, which describe a kiss that begins an affair between two characters:
“Oh, oh, oh,” she heard herself say after they’d both pulled back. She rubbed his head, which felt like velour. Soon she would begin calling him “velour head,” and he would call her “my dove.”
Or this awesomely absurd, Tao Lin-like texting exchange:
“what r u up 2”
“peeing”
“when will u be back”
“look up i am back”
But these playful interludes are, unfortunately, rare. And so The Uncoupling drifts like its own misguided spell, from theme to theme, couple to couple, a confused story about people and a world that I don’t really recognize at all. Paradoxically, it’s The Uncoupling that feels confused, and not at all the way we live now.
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