When you come across one review like Carolyn See‘s WaPo pan of The Spare Wife, the second novel from NY Times staff reporter Alex Witchel, which spends as much time skewering the author’s public image as it does considering the book’s literary merits, you could chalk it up as an anomaly. But when, less than two weeks later, Deirdre Donahue openly mocks Witchel in USA Today for presuming to dedicate the novel to her husband, Frank Rich, by his full name, you start to wonder what it is certain critics have against her—after all, other reviewers who’ve been less than enthralled by the book have managed not to make their scorn so… personal.
But that’s not a topic that comes up when Witchel and I meet for drinks one late afternoon, and not just because our interview date take place well before Donahue gets her shot in. As I broach the subject of reviewers, she interjects politely, “Of course you want people to read the book the way you wrote it,” but then she guides the conversation to how her stepson, Simon Rich, counseled her about letting reviewers get to your self-image as a writer, and when she thanked him for it, he told her, “Well, it’s not my advice! You gave it to me last year, when my book came out!”
Which underscores what a banner year it’s for the Rich family on the book front; Simon’s whipping his second book into shape, and brother Nathaniel has a novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, coming out next month. (“Frank’s the only one not putting out a book this year,” Witchel jokes. “He feels lazy.” Then again, he’s got plenty to keep him busy until November.)
It’s been several years since Witchel’s first novel, Me Times Three, because she’s been writing around her day job at the Times, and she feels like she can only do one or the other on any given day. “So it’s like waking up every single weekend for four years with homework,” she says; later, when asked if there’s a third book on the horizon, she observes that journalism reduces the compelling need to write fiction: “I can’t tell you what it’s like to wake up on a Saturday morning and not have to write a book.” But, she allows, “there’s a fine line between writing about this stuff as myself and writing about it as fiction… The characters have to feel real, but they aren’t. They’re just made-up. If they were real, it wouldn’t have taken so long to write.”
Still, people like to think they know who the real-life models for Witchel’s characters are; she finds that amusing, because “nine times out of ten” they’re completely wrong. While admitting that she does draw some inspiration from personality types, she maintains that that’s as far as it goes. “It’s so simplistic to think that you can pluck a figure from the gossip columns and turn them into a character that would sustain 300 pages of a novel,” she says, and it’s the effort to develop richly detailed interior lives for the characters that distinguishes them from simple stand-ins for whatever public figures people think they recognize.
Anyway, she says, all the emphasis on the guessing games and the social satire misses the theme that she was trying to draw out in the relationship between Ponce, the “spare wife” of the title, and her best friend, Shawsie—a relationship based in part on what the two women haven’t said to each other. Witchel talks enthusiastically about undermining the chick lit fantasy that women can’t wait to share their emotional turmoils with each other, and find instant sympathy for doing it. “Women can be as reticent about expressing their emotions as men are,” she observes, and it’s that reticence between the two that leads to the novel’s most emotionally charged scenes. (There are other dramatic turning points in the story, to be sure, but they tend to rely on various narrative elements colliding into each other; the confrontation between Shawsie and Ponce stands out from these by its less frenetic pace.)
So which type of woman does Witchel see herself as? She says she recognizes a “fuck-you quality” in Ponce that she wishes she had, but when she looks at Shawsie, “I don’t know where she came from, so she would have to come from me.” And what about Babette, the aggressive young wanna-be journalist whose ambition for a big story sets a chain reaction through the other characters’ lives? “I’ve found at least ten Babettes,” she says, looking back at her twenty-year career, “the last just as I was finishing the book… I think there’s a factory that makes them and sends them to New York. [But] they don’t end up successful. I don’t know one who has succeeded, because there are no shortcuts.”
“Everybody looks at the outside of this job, the image, and don’t understand the work that goes into it. I’m sure it’s more glamorous than fixing a toilet, but it’s not no work. You have to work, you have to put in the time. You have to find the question to ask after you’ve asked every question. You have to figure out what to see ater you’ve seen everthing… These girls don’t want to do that. There’s a sense of entitlement, an expectation among these girls that they can have it all tomorrow and they don’t have to do that much for it. They want to be in the Hamptons and you can’t do that…and have the kind of career they’re looking for.”
When Witchel does decide to start a third novel, don’t be surprised if it isn’t another uptown social satire. She’s convinced the setting is only good for one or two novels. “Most of these dinner parties [as seen in The Spare Wife] are about the rich people, and it’s very rare that they change,” she says, claiming that her role at such functions is as a temporary entertainment, moving in that world “but not of it.” (She cites an observation by Nora Ephron: “The rich people are the roses, and we’re the ferns.”) But, she adds, these stories do work outside Manhattan. “People outside New York aren’t the big rubes that people in New York think they are,” she reflects. The wealth-driven social environment she’s writing about exists in cities across America. “It’s like seventh grade with money,” she says of the interpersonal dramas. “Everyone can understand that.”