But Wolitzer has a good feel for the fast-flowing currents of popular culture: “Over time, had begun to describe herself in a matter-of-fact way as queer instead of gay… For Zee, lesbian had gone the way of the cassette tape.” And she is excellent on the ways women – yes, still, many, many women – feel intimidated and made small by a society and an economic system they had precious little role in designing. Its social realism can, as a result, sometimes feel strenuously achieved and a fair amount of the dialogue about feminism is of the “I’ve just swallowed a textbook” variety. This is an unashamedly traditional novel of ideas, not afraid to boldly inhabit the moment we live in. Living quietly is absolutely the opposite of what many of feminism’s most ardent adherents have in mind, and in many cases quite rightly so, but Wolitzer is at her wisest when pointing out how a purposeful life can take on many forms. “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” It’s a bittersweet echo, since much of The Female Persuasion is concerned with the achievements and failures of the modern feminist movement, from the Sixties to the present day, and most pressingly, with where the movement can go, now that many big battles for sexual equality have been won. This moment, to me, recalls the conclusion of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I feel like Cory is kind of a big feminist, right?” “Here’s this person who gave up his plans… and takes care of. Greer dismisses the new life of her former flame, who once shared her callow ambition to change the world and who now cleans houses his mother used to clean. Greer, his former high-school girlfriend, is also newly back home, her career with a glamorous feminist foundation in New York in tatters. Cory Pinto, a high-flying Princeton graduate, has been back in his dead-end home town for three years, having abandoned a promising finance job to look after his chronically depressed mother after a tragedy tore his family apart. Near the end of Meg Wolitzer’s zesty new novel is a seemingly throwaway paragraph towards which, nevertheless, the entire book has been leading.
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