The Uncoupling

AUTHOR: Meg Wolitzer
PUBLISHED: 2011
GENRE: Fiction

I can only imagine what Sigmund Freud would have to say about pop culture's sudden interest in Lysistrata.  One of the few extant plays of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, Lysistrata is the tale of one women's crusade to persuade* the women of Greece to boycott sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War.  Given ancient Greece's strict gender roles, theatergoers must have been shocked by its forward content.** It's still shocking enough to merit a mini-renaissance.  The play has spurned a musical, Lysistrata Jones, which had been getting great reviews. It also inspired Wolitzer to write this book. 

Dory and Robby Lang are those people: happy in their jobs, satisfied in their marriage, they teach together at the local high school, where they are the cool teachers.  Everything's on an even keel until the new drama teacher proposes Lysistrata for the fall play.  The problem isn't so much the play as the spell that accompanies it: suddenly, inexplicably, every women in town stops having sex with her significant other.  Marriages grow awkward and stale.  Passionate first loves die a painful death.  The whole town is suffering and no one knows why.

The prose starts strong but peters out pitifully, along with the plot line.  The book begs two huge questions.  First, what the hell kind of high school would allow a sex comedy (see the lioness in the cheese grater below) as the school play?  A few parents complain but the principal shuts them down in the name of freedom of expression.  The play is so shoehorned into the plot as to never be really believable.  The second question: what is the spell? The spirit of Aristophanes come to life? A wicked witch blown in from Oz?  The eventual answer - which isn't really an answer at all - is seriously lame. 

The story is wandering along sort of aimlessly when the last-act subplot kicks the reader in the nuts - the girl set to play Lysistrata wakes up one morning refusing to get out of bed until the US pulls out of Afghanistan.  Suddenly, the play's main action is split into two - an act of protest, and a sex strike.  Separated out, neither makes sense.  The protest loses any potency and becomes the silly act of a teenage girl; the sex strike loses any purpose and becomes either a supernatural spell or an unbelievable coincidence.  I imagine Wolitzer was trying to avoid the accusation that she had just modernized the language of an old play.  To have kept the action together - the students are inspired by the play and dump their boyfriends, for instance - would have been a more literal telling.  But it also would have made a lot more sense.

The whole thing is incredible awkward.  This might have been what Wolitzer was going for - after all, it's all very personal what these people are experiencing.***  Unfortunately, that's the only thing that works. 

LENGTH: 288 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Sure.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: No.  It's a poor reflection on a 2,500-year-old classic.

*Persuade, not convince, since it's an action, not a belief.  See? Fun!

** The women give a speech listing their favorite sexual positions, including - I kid you not - the lioness on the cheese grater.  I cannot say if something was lost in the translation from the original Greek.  I'd rather not say anything else, actually; this is a family blog.  (Okay, one thing.  They had cheese graters in ancient Greece?)  Just thought I'd throw that out there.

***It's not exactly lunch table conversation.  "So, Sue, I've found recently that the thought of sleeping my husband is revolting to me, and I would rather sacrifice my marriage than touch him.  How about you and Bob?"