The Wife

Joan Castleman, a 64-year-old woman, sits in first class beside her husband, Joseph Castleman, a celebrated American novelist, on a Finnair flight to Helsinki, Finland. Joe is about to receive the Helsinki Prize, a major literary award. In this moment of apparent triumph, Joan has decided to leave him. She describes Joe as "one of those men who own the world" (10), a short, slack-bellied writer who loves rich food, whiskey, and the attention of women. Their marriage, once passionate, has long since calcified, and Joan recognizes that their public image as a contented couple is a fabrication.

Joan narrates Joe's backstory in flashback. Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Joe lost his father to a heart attack when Joe was seven and grew up surrounded by women: his possessive mother Lorna, two aunts, and his tiny grandmother. He escaped to Columbia University, where he became an English major and developed literary ambitions. In middle age, he lives in Weathermill, New York, and Joan compares him to his close friend Lev Bresner, a Holocaust survivor and eminent novelist whose Helsinki Prize win years earlier sent Joe into a depression. Joe's own novels, including The Walnut and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Overtime, are translated into dozens of languages and praised for their sensitive portrayals of American marriages and female perspectives.

The narrative shifts to the night the Helsinki Prize call arrives. Joan goes to bed early, refusing to keep vigil. At 5:20 a.m., Teuvo Halonen, the acting president of the Finnish Academy of Letters, delivers the news. Joan picks up the extension in their daughter Susannah's old bedroom. Joe asks Joan to jump on the bed with him, and despite her reluctance, they bounce together briefly, a fleeting moment of shared feeling before the prize machinery takes over.

Joan flashes back to 1956, when she was a 19-year-old English major at Smith College. She enrolled in a creative writing class taught by Professor J. Castleman, a young, handsome instructor who read aloud from James Joyce's "The Dead" on the first day. Joan was immediately drawn to him. That semester, a visiting novelist named Elaine Mozell warned Joan at a reception that the literary establishment was a conspiracy to keep women's voices small. Elaine's own novel would soon go out of print, but her warning lodged permanently in Joan's mind.

Joe praised Joan's writing during office hours and invited her to babysit his infant daughter, Fanny. While alone in the Castleman house, Joan found a walnut with a painted red heart inscribed to Joe's wife, Carol. Joe and Joan began an affair; he gave Joan a walnut with a nearly identical inscription. When Carol discovered the affair, she confronted Joan in her dormitory room and hurled the walnut at Joan's forehead, leaving a bruise. Joan fell to the floor but privately thought her own life had finally begun.

Joe was forced out of Smith, and Joan dropped out to flee to New York with him. They moved into a grim room at the Waverly Arms hotel in Greenwich Village. Joan got a job as an editorial assistant to Hal Wellman at the publishing house Bower & Leeds. Joe produced the first 21 pages of The Walnut, a novel based on their own story. Joan read the draft and was devastated: The writing was lifeless, just like his earlier published story "No Milk on Sunday," which she had privately recognized as poor.

Joan confessed her honest assessment, and Joe was furious. Then Joan began crossing out his words and replacing them with her own. The prose came alive under her hands. Joe asked her to help with just this one novel, promising that afterward Joan could write her own books. She agreed, rationalizing the arrangement through Elaine Mozell's warnings, her own fear of exposure, and her desire for their shared life to flourish. The arrangement became permanent. Over the decades, Joe fed Joan plots and life experiences while she wrote the prose. He typed final copies, making minor changes, developing enough familiarity with the text to present it as his.

The Walnut became enormously successful. Joe grew famous, appeared in Life magazine, and gave readings at major venues. Joan watched from the audience, holding his briefcase, fending off admiring women. They married at City Hall. Joe's first wife, Carol, took their daughter Fanny to Sausalito, California, and Joe gradually relinquished contact with Fanny. Joan and Joe had three children: Susannah, who craved her father's attention; Alice, who eventually came out as a lesbian; and David, brilliant but emotionally troubled. Joe began cheating on Joan almost immediately, with their baby-sitter, with women at readings, and with students at writing conferences. Joan mostly looked away. At a summer writing conference at Butternut Peak, Joe carried on an affair with a young fiction student named Merry Cheslin, and Joan wept openly in a crafts shop while other writers' wives comforted her. Years later, David, during a stay at the family home, held a steak knife to Joe's throat and accused Joe of keeping Joan as his "slave" (203). Joan talked David down but denied his accusations about her role in Joe's writing.

The narrative returns to Helsinki. At the hotel, Joan and Joe encounter Nathaniel Bone, a literary critic who has spent a decade writing an unauthorized biography of Joe. Joan agrees to a drink with Bone at a restaurant called the Golden Onion. Bone reveals that Joe had cheated even before Joan and suggests Joan was Joe's creative force. Joan deflects but does not shut Bone down. At the Opera House ceremony, Joe receives his medal and publicly credits Joan as "truly my better half" (182), despite her explicit request that he not thank her. Joan seethes, reflecting on how "women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night" (175).

After the banquet, Joan rides back to the hotel alone in a limousine. Drunk in the backseat, she hallucinates conversations with figures from her past: Elaine Mozell, her dead mother, Tosha Bresner (Lev's wife, who died by suicide years earlier), Joe's mother Lorna, and Valerian Qaanaaq, a young Inuit novelist whose bestselling debut represents a bold new generation of women writers. These apparitions interrogate Joan about her choices and her suppressed writing career.

Joe arrives at the suite at 5 a.m., drunk and elated. Joan follows him into the private sauna and tells him she wants a separation. They argue bitterly. Joan declares she plans to reveal the truth to Bone: that she wrote Joe's novels, that she "even won the Helsinki Prize" (201). Joe pushes her against the dresser. She pushes back. He falls against the bed and clutches his chest, just as he did during a heart attack years earlier. Joan calls the front desk and performs CPR, pressing her mouth to his in what she describes as "a husband and wife finally saying good-bye" (210).

Joe dies at a nearby hospital. Joan flies home with his casket in the cargo hold. On the plane, Nathaniel Bone approaches and asks about what Joan implied at the Golden Onion. Joan reverses course, telling him what he implied "isn't true" (217). She offers to help with archives but nothing more, then says: "Joe was a wonderful writer. And I will always miss him" (211). Joan keeps the secret, reflecting privately that she might someday make something of her own, "maybe even putting my name on it" (209).