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| The Ten-Year Nap | 
 enlarge | Author: Meg Wolitzer
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $11.99
You Save: $12.96 (52%)
New (38) Used (25) from $9.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 4034
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 351
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 1594489785
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781594489785
ASIN: 1594489785
Publication Date: March 27, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Read this book March 27, 2008
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
I can't say enough great things about the Ten Year Nap. It is, foremost, a terrific read--fascinating, funny, riveting, and entertaining. But it is more than that, too: it is a provocative look at what it's like to be a mother today: is it possible to fulfill one's obligations to family and still have an interesting, meaningful life? This is the important subject of this book. I really loved The Ten Year Nap (and I'm not a mother).
Good writing, some good moments, but ultimately unreadable April 25, 2008
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
Clearly, Wolitzer is a writer. Her turn of phrase is beautiful and there are times when she perfectly describes motherhood in ways that make you want to copy it down and put it on the fridge. However, I could not commit to a book where the structure is a meandering, musing, retrospective narrative with very little active plot.
100 pages in, I put it down and doubt I will pick it up again.
Basically, you meet various mothers and they muse upon their entire history before children, then they think about the early years and their entrance into motherhood, and then they think about their current situation (with which they are dissatisfied--this is not a feel good book per se).
The tag line for this book could be "I'm a mother, therefore I think and think and think and think and am unhappy."
The whole book is one big retrospective thought.
I really don't care if a character failed graduate school, or if a lawyer was ambivalent about law neither of these things appeared to be relevant to me as a reader.
Then there's a bizarre detour into the life of Margaret Thatcher's assistant and Thatcher's views on feminism.
Then another bizarre detour where the women of the previous generation invite a guidance counselor to their home to show them her genitalia.
And then we're back to the present world where one of the moms confides to one of the other moms that she's having an affair.
Huh?
I couldn't find the connection, the common thread that linked all of this into an active plot and ultimately I lost interest in continuing to try.
Also, as a new stay-at-home-mom myself who gave up a promising career, I hope there's more to being a mom than being lost and adrift in a sea of low self-esteem ten years from now. Talk about a downer, this book really has nothing good to say.
M
 I Threw the book away it was so bad May 31, 2008
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
This book was given to me, and I actually threw it away. I plowed through about half of it, hoping it would get better until my husband asked me if I was enjoying my book. I realized how painful it was, and realized I couldn't subject anyone else to it, so I threw it away. The writing was tedious, the subject matter was predictable. The women in the story were so bored they were having affairs--is that all there is to look forward to if you decide not to work and stay home with your children? I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.
"Not working did not mean that you did nothing." April 25, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Meg Wolitzer's "The Ten-Year Nap" focuses on four women who dropped out of the labor force to become full-time mothers. Ten years pass and each of them takes stock of her life and wonders if she made the right decision. Amy Lamb has been married for thirteen years to Leo Buckner, a commercial litigator. They are barely staying afloat financially; Leo's salary just about covers their rent, their son's tuition, and the high cost of everything in Manhattan. Jill Hamlin and her husband, Donald, left New York City for the leafy suburb of Holly Hills. When Jill failed to conceive, the couple adopted a little girl from Siberia who may have developmental problems. Roberta Sokolov lives with her puppeteer husband and their two kids in a walk-up. Her career as a budding painter never materialized, and she uses her talents to help her children create elaborate arts and crafts projects. Karen Tang is a blissful homemaker who worships her successful husband, Wilson Yip, and claims to love not having to work outside the home. She feels this way in spite of her amazing intellectual gifts. Karen is a math whiz who could make a fortune as a statistical analyst; she goes for job interviews every few weeks but never accepts any of the positions offered to her by prestigious firms.
Raising a child is an important and fulfilling job, unless you believe that it isn't. Sometimes, spending your time having a bite with the ladies, shopping for asparagus, packing lunches, and listening to your husband tell you about his day can be wearying. When Amy befriends Peggy Ramsey, a beautiful and accomplished museum director, she cannot help but be jealous of this lovely creature who "possessed power in the hard-shelled armed male world." Although Peggy seems to have it all, she also risks it all when she embarks on a reckless love affair. Except for Karen, the stay-at-home moms are stagnating emotionally and fear that they will never manage to reach their full potential. At times, they feel unappreciated and discontented.
Using flashbacks, Wolitzer contrasts the lives of her protagonists with those of their mothers before them: Amy's Canadian mom, Antonia, was a progressive thinker and novelist; Jill's mother, Susan, was a severely depressed former actress; Karen's mother toiled in a restaurant kitchen in San Francisco; and Roberta's mother and her husband ran a company that created unusual centerpieces for banquets. Contemporary women have been sold a bill of goods about having it all, but that is a blatant lie, Wolitzer suggests. The "fruits of feminism" have not completely ripened. "Men and women [are] still both evolving," and it might take another generation or even longer for true equality of the sexes to become the norm. In an eloquent passage, Amy's mother declares: "We were the early ones. I know we got some things wrong, but we did try to do right by everyone. And now I guess it's out of our hands."
The author gets many things right. Her prose is precise and carefully calibrated, her central characters are beautifully defined, and she has an intuitive feel for the cadences of life in New York City, before and after 9/11. Wolitzer asks: How long should a woman stay at home with the children, if indeed she should stay at home with them at all? How can a man and women who barely see one another (and have less in common as time goes by) keep their marriage from growing stale? Are adult women invariably the product of their mothers' attitudes, experiences, and expectations? What are the pluses and minuses of city versus suburban living? There are no easy answers but these questions are well worth raising.
"The Ten-Year Nap" is a witty, stylish, and often moving novel that deals intelligently with family, work, and the stresses of modern living. Even minor characters stand out. For instance, a divorcee named Geralynn Freund is aggressively anorexic; she is "frightening in her rapaciousness for exercise" and has arms like twigs. She is proud of her "eating difference," which she considers to be just another lifestyle choice. Like an anthropologist among a little known species, the author trains her lens mercilessly on her characters' self-centeredness. These are middle-class women who spend a great deal of time whining because they have enough time on their hands to obsess about their problems. Still, Wolitzer makes them so human and vulnerable that we hesitate to judge them harshly. She also celebrates the joys of female bonding. This is a wry and clever novel that examines our tendency to long for what we do not have and to take for granted what we do have. Most of Wolitzer's protagonists eventually wake up from their naps, and it's entertaining to watch them do so.
 Liberal view of stay-at-home moms May 5, 2008
8 out of 18 found this review helpful
I did not enjoy the book. The book should have a warning label..."Conservatives beware!" As a stay-at-home mom in my mommy years and the mother of a stay-at-home mom, I was uncomfortable (and at times angry) reading this book. I don't think it paints a true picture. It does, however, paint the picture liberals want the world to see. There were times in the book that left-wing politics weren't as obvious, and I enjoyed those parts of the book. The author is obviously very intelligent and talented...too bad her anti-war, anti-Bush, extreme feminist views were so overbearing.
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