The Ten-Year Nap [Hardcover]

Meg Wolitzer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1594489785 | ISBN-13: 978-1594489785 | Publication Date: March 27, 2008

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 educated women chooses not to work.

For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been largely defined by marriage and motherhood. Educated and reared to believe that they would conquer the world, they then left jobs as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and film scouts to stay home with their babies. What was meant to be a temporary leave of absence has lasted a decade. Now, at age forty, with the halcyon days of young motherhood behind them and without professions to define them, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen face a life that is not what they were brought up to expect but seems to be the one they have chosen.

But when Amy gets to know a charismatic and successful working mother of three who appears to have fulfilled the classic women's dream of having it all-work, love, family-without having to give anything up, a lifetime's worth of concerns, both practical and existential, opens up. As Amy's obsession with this woman's bustling life grows, it forces the four friends to confront the choices they've made in opting out of their careers-until a series of startling events shatters the peace and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely.

Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of these women with candor, wit, and generosity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her latest novel, Wolitzer (The Wife; etc.) takes a close look at the opt out generation: her cast of primary characters have all abandoned promising careers (in art, law and academia) in favor of full-time motherhood. When their children were babies, that decision was defensible to themselves and others; 10 years on, all of these women, whose interconnected stories merge during their regular breakfasts at a Manhattan restaurant, harbor hidden doubts. Do their mundane daily routines and ever-more tenuous connections to increasingly independent children compensate for all that lost promise? Wolitzer centers her narrative on comparisons between her smart but bored modern-day New York and suburban mommies and the women of the generation preceding them, who fought for women's liberation and equality. Contemporary chapters, most of which focus on a single character in this small circle of friends, alternate with vignettes from earlier eras, placing her characters' crises in the context of the women, famous and anonymous, who came before. Wolitzer's novel offers a hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, vision of women's (and men's) capacity for reinvention and the discovery of new purpose. (Mar.)
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Review

“Wolitzer is as precise and rigorous an observer of social status as Tom Wolfe; she is as incisive and pitiless and clear-eyed a chronicler of female-male tandems as Philip Roth or John Updike.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Vividly, satisfyingly real.”
—Entertainment Weekly (A-)

“Wolitzer perfectly captures her women’s resolve in the face of a dizzying array of conflicting loyalties.”
—Washington Post

“Very entertaining. The tartly funny Wolitzer is a miniaturist who can nail a contemporary type, scene, or artifact with deadeye accuracy.”
—The New York Times

“Smart and funny.”
—Booklist

“Immensely enjoyable.”
—Miami Herald

“Wise and witty.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Engrossing and juicy.”
—Salon

“Liberating and poignant.”
—Elle --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 351 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (March 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489785
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489785
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (115 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #658,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I liked it but..., April 6, 2008

By 

Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ten-Year Nap (Hardcover)

...there sure was an awful lot of whining going on. I wasn't particularly "taken" by most of the characters, self-involved women (and some men), living mainly on New York City's Upper East and West Sides. The main character, Amy, had a lawyer-husband and a 10 year old son. She had stopped working as a lawyer when her son was born and seemed to miss working, but not enough to stop whining about it and go back to work. Her mother was a proto-feminist, based in Toronto. Other characters, mothers of sons who attended an elite day school, drifted through the story.

Amy's closest friend from college - the daughter of a suicide - had left Manhattan for a leafy suburb in either New Jersey or New York, with her husband and adopted daughter from Russia. The daughter was not quite "with-it" and the mother felt little emotional connection with the child.
I kept waiting for the parents to have an "aha" moment and take the kid to be tested. Nope, didn't happen til the end.

Other friends had other "issues". I basically wanted to slap them all and say "quit whining and do something".

I would advise not investing a great deal of time or money in this book. If you haven't already bought it, wait til it's out in trade paper or borrow it from the library.

78 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Meg Wolitzer really "gets it", March 31, 2008

By 

Someone's Mom (Chesapeake, VA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Ten-Year Nap (Hardcover)

It's been a while since I've reviewed anything on Amazon but I just wanted to say how much I loved this book. I devoured it in a weekend and found myself stopping my husband in whatever he was doing to read him random bits and snippets, mostly because Meg Wolitzer so perfectly summed up so many of the sentiments I myself had felt during the years I stayed home with my kids.

For example, there's a passage near the beginning where one of the characters talks about picking up a newspaper like the New YOrk Times and reading yet another profile of a high-powered women who "does it all." And Meg Wolitzer writes (I'm paraphrasing) that 'she wished there was something like an asterisk at the end of the article which referred you to a box at the bottom of the page which explained the backstory, what the real deal was.' And that's EXACTLY how I felt the whole time I was trying to juggle life in the foreign service with raising little kids and being pregnant. Everytime I caught a glimmer of someone who somehow or other effortlessly did it all, you'd start to talk to them and they'd say something like "Well, actually it was easy. You see, my mother had recently retired and she was widowed so she moved to Botswana for eight years and watched my kids for me while I climbed up through the ranks to become Ambassador" or "Well, actually they're my stepchildren. My husband is actually forty years older than I am, so by the time I became a "mom", the kids had already graduated from college" or something.

There are just these little MOMENTS throughout the book where I found myself exclaiming "yes, yes. she really understands. I'm not alone. I'm not crazy." Another example -- she describes the insecure mom picking up the child at school and the child is in first grade and the mom finds herself checking out all the books the other kids are reading, trying to figure out if her child is where she should be in her reading. It's like we all do these things but never admit them, and then Meg Wolitzer comes along and writes this book -- and you realize it's not just you.

I really hope this book gets people talking -- especially the dialogue between the main character and her earnest Canadian feminist mother who can't understand how the women's movement could have ended up at this point. This is just a great book!

50 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, timely, funny -- she just nails it, March 27, 2008

By 

George DeMark (Chicago, Ill.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ten-Year Nap (Hardcover)

I bought this book yesterday after hearing the author on NPR with Terry Gross and seeing the profile of her in the New York Times and was up most of the night (and half of the morning) finishing this unbelievably good novel up, though i was a little teed off my bookstore didn't have the book until yesterday (publishers, what is the matter with you?). Wolitzer has everything you want in a writer -- it's like having a conversation with an unbelievably perceptive, wickedly amusing, but also on the inside serious person. And this novel takes a hard and entirely convincing look at the issues and the dilemmas facing women today. should they work or not work? is a woman's role to take care of her kids and can you "have it all" and if you do, does that mean something has to be sacrificed (your marriage, your relationship with your kids, your work?). i have never seen a book tackle something like this before in such a believable way (and i'm a guy, so this isn't really a topic that should interest me much, but I see it in my wife and in just about every woman i know and work with). so all in all she (wolitzer) has managed to carry off something pretty impossible in my opinion -- a page turner that's also a wonderful, beautifully written read. how often can you say that about a book? 5 stars all the way.