Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife was one of my favorite things I read last year so with some trepidation I watched the film last night, which I didn’t know existed until I saw the trailer in my twitter feed. It’s not a great movie – I don’t get why they had to make the husband win the Nobel when the whole point in the novel was he won the lesser “Oslo” prize, and while casting Jermey Irons’ son as the son crushed by being the son of a famous man probably seemed promising, he seems completely lost. Glenn Close (and her daughter, playing a younger version of herself) are completely brilliant, and this Gen Xer will never not be excited to see Christian Slater drop in, and he’s amazing as the slimy would-be biographer. And I appreciate that they named checked a house in the obligatory Smith reference. 

Something the movie does amazingly well, in a different key than how it was done in the novel, is show the absurdity of prize culture – the handlers who teach you how to bow to the king, the Great Writer being introduced to the chemist he of course has nothing to say to, the sterile rooms and hollow words that mean nothing while paying tribute to the power of words. 

I watched this while procrasitinating from preparing for my Spring classes, including introduction to Creative Writing. This time I’m going to try using Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, which is all about the daily practice of observation. I tell students writing is about how “creative” you think you are, or how talented, or what brilliant ideas you have, but about the practice of paying attention. Of course one has to discipline oneself to believe this. You can only go so far with the spiritual stuff outwardly but I do kind of believe this. 

Glenn Close ending the movie with a blank page is not the most original thing in the world but I found myself moved by it. It seems deliberate an important that it remains blank. We don’t see her start to write the One Great Work that will even the score. “The writer is the one who writes,” people say, against credentialism or MFA culture, and I think that’s true, but even more, I think, the writer is the one who pays attention. Curtis Sittenfield gets at this nicely in her great New Yorker story about MFA-land, where everyone is jockeying for the coin of that realm, a fellowship. (It’s darkly amusing to me that there and in the film, teaching is the terrible thing that will happen to you if you don’t make it. The myth that Real Writers must hate teaching knits nicely with the others about their selfishness). “Don’t think all this literature stuff is going to teach you how to live,” Alice Kaplan recalls Paul de Man telling the eager graduate students in French Lessons, a lesson she remembers with a twinge after they learned of his rendez-vous with fascism. “Why Write” I ask my students on the first day. No one of course says prizes, but the equvlients are there for all of us: validation, recognition, even vengence. Some of these may be rigtheous reasons, they may motivate, they may provide good work. But stubbornly, I still think, sometimes, that the purpose is to teach us how to live, that if we step out of the midcentury mythology of the writer who must behave badly, there is something in the practices that guides us. 

I think a lot about the fact that Kerouac died a middle-aged alcholoic in his parent’s basement and that Ginsberg died an old man surrounded by people who loved him chanting for him. The difference was that Ginsberg dealt with and accepted his sexuality, but it was also something, I believe, in how he wrote, not to record the great rolicking adventures, not to compete with life or stop time but to make peace with it.