cornelia's Full Review: Ayelet Waldman - Death Gets a Time-Out
This is a review of Ayelet Waldman's mystery series. Since there is no way to submit such an overview here, I'm linking to her most recent mystery. --CR
For the past two years, I’ve been at work on a mystery novel. When not writing, I immerse myself in the genre, having now read several hundred books: the good, the bad, and, yes, the utterly lame. In all the teetering tome-piles now choking my house—stacks of everything from Dorothy Sayers to Sara Paretsky, Raymond Chandler to James Lee Burke—one author stands out to me as the most compelling at work today: Ayelet Waldman, creator of the "Mommy-Track" series. Her books feature amateur sleuth Juliet Applebaum, like Waldman a one-time federal defense attorney now at home with small children.
Waldman has engaged in the kind of genre-bending that makes top-notch mysteries so much more engaging than the majority of contemporary "mainstream" fiction—those books by authors whose desiccated minimalism and aversion-to-true-narrative leave so many of us gasping for air and reaching for reissued paperbacks of the long dead.
At first glance, her novels are deceptively frothy. Waldman herself has said they’re designed "to be read during one all-night nursing session," and the importance of what she’s tackling therein can be masked by her exquisite comic timing. She more than rivals an Evanovich, a Hiassen—think Dorothy Parker wrestling with Snuglis, stale Cheerios, and baby butt-wipes.
In addition to being funny as hell and intensely character-driven, however, each of her mysteries has at its heart an incisive examination of a specific issue: the harrowing competition for "a good education" starting pre-pre-school in Nursery Crimes, the societal relationship between Orthodox and secular Jews in The Big Nap, adoption rights and Tay-Sachs in A Playdate With Death, and the "recovered-memory" movement in her latest, Death Takes a Time-Out. Murder Plays House is due out in 2004, and will center on Pro-Ana, the Internet community of women defending their anorexia as "a lifestyle choice," not a deadly disease.
What matters most to me about these books, however, is another issue, one that overarches and informs them all—Motherhood. Like many another woman today educated to tackle a career (Wesleyan and Harvard Law in Waldman’s case), Waldman and her doppelganger Applebaum grapple with how to stay sane in the face of the great contemporary female conundrum, making your children a priority without sacrificing your intellect and identity, your ability to make a difference and be heard in the greater world.
I think in this generation of women, caught between Baby Boom and Gen X, there’s a whole lotta dominant-paradigm-subversion goin’ on, a refusal to view career and child-rearing as an either-or proposition. Most of us don’t want to be work-identified to the point that we blow off our fertility altogether or treat babies like Prada-clad accessories, pecked on the cheek between high-powered meetings. On the other hand, we yearn for an
intellectual life outside stolen moments with Proust at the playground.
The last generation of feminists seemed to cope with this dichotomy by having kids at twenty and moving on to careers as they were freed by the children growing up. And perhaps it’s because the professional options we have didn’t exist for most young women in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Parenting, for them, won out over the slim pickings in the secretarial pool--not to mention the fact that available birth control sucked. Later on you could be Gail Sheehy or Barbara Walters or Erica Jong. There was time.
My women friends and I all worked first, not least because it seems tougher now to afford kids on a single "starter" income. We got somewhat established, as editors and stock analysts, lawyers and chefs and textile designers, before tackling the baby thing in our Thirties or Forties. Most of us took ourselves out of the running career-wise when the idea of day-care started to gnaw at us, when we missed our kids too much. We’re the lucky ones, the ones with the option not to work full-time. Oh yes, and we’re losing our minds.
As great and important as primary parenting can be—all those moments when your kids just knock you the hell out with wonder, and you wouldn’t give it up for anything—it’s mostly the same old endless rinse cycle of rote work that Betty Friedan so scathingly summarized. Older women tell us it won’t last forever. Some even tell us we’ll look back with longing on the years of morning sickness and Teddy-Graham-encrusted sweat pants and watching so many hours of Disney videos that we catch ourselves whistling "Cruella DeVille" in the grocery aisle.
Ayelet Waldman reminds us that it’s okay to be a little uppity about the whole thing right now. That we don’t have to have a guilt meltdown if we’re not making our own Play-Doh and cruelty-free baby food while knitting organic diapers, that sometimes we’re going to give the kids mac and cheese for the second or third night in a row because we just want to sit down with a glass of wine and a fistful of Excedrin.
In a Publisher’s Weekly interview, Waldman said of her character:
It's not that Juliet doesn't want to be a mother; it's that she's incredibly bored by parenting. Entertaining someone with a three-and-a-half minute attention span for eight hours a day is unbearable. I thought I was the only one who thinks this way. But then the people who e-mail me—it's almost exclusively women but I've heard from some men—write something like, ‘Thank you for saying it,’ for speaking the heresy that maybe child-rearing is not all it's cracked up to be.
More importantly, though, Waldman reminds us that we can still find time to create, to work, to make a difference by paying attention and making use of the temporal nooks and crannies that at-home parenting affords. It might be freelancing, it might be part-time, it might be as a volunteer or "on spec," but you can keep your hand in at what you’re good at, what you’ve been trained for. Or, as in her case, find yourself doing something you never imagined.
When she started writing Nursery Crimes during her first child’s naps, Waldman had never before written so much as a short story. That novel garnered her a three-book deal with Berkley Prime Crime, an imprint of Penguin-Putnam. She now has four kids and four books out, with two more (novels, not offspring) on the way.
Her fifth book, Daughter’s Keeper, is not a mystery. Due out in October of 2003, this novel examines both our overwrought and draconian drug policy, and the indelible bonds between mother and child. Drug law is an issue close to Waldman’s heart, and she teaches a graduate seminar on it each week at The University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Law School. She has said that the topic was something she wanted to handle, fictionally, outside the humorous voice of her Mommy-Track novels.
But she doesn’t claim that a non-genre book is somehow more "real," more literary. In that P.W. interview, she said, "I'm comfortable with the label genre writer, but I resist the notion that there's anything inherently wrong with mystery writing."
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