Ayelet Waldman
Random House
352 pages
REVIEWS & PRAISE
"There are some traits that women don't like in other women. These include home wrecking. Let's be more specific: seducing a married man in the workplace. Even worse? Seducing the married father of a small child. We also don't like women who are awkward around children. What kind of shrew doesn't lactate at the very sight of tiny fingers and plump cheeks? Add to the list: women who wear garter belts and women who dye their hair red.
The narrator of Ayelet Waldman's bravely contrary new novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' is one of these adulterous, red-haired sisters. And Waldman's complex and genuine portrait of her is just one of the elements that make the book such a moving and darkly funny read.
'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits' is clearly out to irritate some Mommy groups. It may also be the first chick-lit novel (it features, after all, a young career woman who falls in love with her boss, shops and worries about her relationships) that in addition to being a romantic, shocking and sometimes painful page-turner does the unthinkable: it actually says something new and interesting about women, families and love."
—"Atom Bomb of Desire," The New York Times (read the full review)
"In the opening scene of 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman's compelling and artfully drawn new novel, Emilia Greenleaf is making her way through Central Park on her way to pick up her stepson, William, from daycare. The park, her refuge since childhood, holds the solitude she craves—if only she can make it past the playgrounds. Emilia's infant daughter, Isabel, has recently died, exiling Emilia from the careless camaraderie of mothers and leaving her marriage to Jack Woolf in danger of collapse.
Absolution comes for Emilia from an unexpected source, and she is able, finally, to emerge from her grief, to forgive her betrayals and those of others—to forgive even the fact that love is not the stuff of fairy tales but something that grows from the ordinary moments, good and bad, that make a life. There are maps of Central Park, but Emilia, though often lost there, never buys one, sensing perhaps that the truest discoveries are made by plunging off the path into unknown territory, willingly or not. At the end of this absorbing novel, Isabel is still dead, and William still asks too many questions, but Emilia herself is movingly, powerfully transformed, having journeyed through the most difficult terrain a parent can imagine, learning on her way to appreciate life's "accidental beauty," its unexpected and inexplicable moments of grace."
—"Lost and Found," The Washington Post (read the full review)
"It's Emilia's relationship with her stepson, not her husband, that forms the book's backbone… Their relationship is never perfect, of course, but its evolution from fraught to somewhat solid is extremely gratifying.
Waldman's portrait of Emilia is rewarding, too: We watch her change from an immature, self-centered recluse whose relationship with her husband almost combusts to a loving wife and stepmother who finally learns to recognize grace, finding it when "something is more beautiful than we deserve, more elegant and lovely than it should be." And no matter Emilia's state (furious, resentful, at peace or otherwise), she's always sharp, wickedly funny, opinionated and cheerfully bitter, lending depth and energy to this wise, entertaining book.
—"Love of Her Life Comes With a 5-Year-Old Boy," San Francisco Chronicle (read the full review)
"How a five-year-old manages to make the adults in his life hew to the love he holds for them is the sweet treat in this honest, brutal, bitterly funny slice of life. When Emelia's day-old daughter, Isabel, succumbs to SIDS, her own life stalls. She can't work; she can't sleep; Central Park, once her personal secret garden, now is a minefield of happy mother-child dyads. Since Isabel's death, husband Jack's only solace for the guilt of breaking up his sexless marriage with Carolyn for Emelia's (now-absent) passion and love is joint custody of William, now five. What Emelia cannot bear most are Wednesdays, when she must cross the park to collect William at the 92nd Street Y preschool and take another shot at stepmotherhood. Carolyn, William's furious mother and a renowned Upper East Side OB/GYN, lives to nab Emelia for mistakes in handling him. Carolyn's indicting phone calls raise the already sky-high tension in Jack and Emelia's home, but they don't compare with Carolyn's announcement that, at age 42, she is pregnant. The news pushes Emelia to confess to Jack two things she shouldn't. William is charmingly realized, and Waldman (Daughter's Keeper) has upper bourgeois New York down cold. The result is a terrific adult story."
—Publishers Weekly
"'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits' is a beautiful novel… If you are not moved to tears, then your heart is carved from wood."
—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
"I had a great time reading 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits'… The heroine was a great accomplishment… and William (her stepson) is a triumph."
—Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce
"I read this book in one sitting… Ayelet Waldman is that good."
—Sherman Alexie, author of Ten Little Indians
"One of the sweetest and smartest and most poignant novels I've read in a long time. It's also very funny."
—Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwives and Before You Know Kindness
HOME PAGE: Author photo by Reenie Raschke. Big Barda illustration by Clarkent78. Photo of Pat Conroy by David G. Spielman.