The Position (2005)

"Fuck the book, Holly used to say. Yes, that was about right: Fuck the book."

Depending on how you look at it, Meg Wolitzer's The Position is a novel about how a book destroyed the members of a family, or it's about how a book provided the framework for the destruction that would have happened regardless. It centers on the Mellows, Roz and Paul, the parents who write the how-to book "Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment," and their four children: Holly, Michael, Dashiell, and Claudia, all of whom are deeply affected by the book's existence.

The novel begins with the childrens' discovery of the book - Holly and Michael are adolescents, Dashiell and Claudia still very young - and with the family in tact and happy, but most of the novel takes places three decades later, when publishers want to reissue the book to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Roz and Paul are by now divorced and the children are grown with lives and problems of their own. Holly has become a spectre, a figure only nominally connected to the rest of the family and determined to keep it that way; Michael is a workaholic whose anti-depressants have made him unable to function sexually; Dashiell is a Log Cabin Republican; and Claudia is aimless, struggling to find her place in the world.

Wolitzer moves back and forth between the characters, relating the story from their various perspectives. The children are all shown to have been profoundly impacted by the fact of the book, though the issues really have more to do with the implosion of their parents' marriage soon after the book's publication and the knowledge that intense sexual intimacy is not, necessarily, a guarantee of relationship longevity (the only exception seems to be Dashiell, whose issue is with the book, specifically with the fact that there's nothing in it that he can connect to his own experiences and desires). The Position is a sexually frank, if not necessarily erotic, novel with a few brief flashes of brilliance. All things told it's a bit uneven, but it's ultimately worth a read.