A nonlinear rebuke to the tidy ordering of the classics ... A ferment of ideas and references — it contains sharp forays into the history of divorce and shrewd readings of books like Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages — but its true innovation is formal. The divorce it memorializes is both personal and narrative: Mlotek leaves the comforts of her marriage in search of chaos, and her story strays from the neat staple of sequence in search of stranger surprises ... Not even a narrative so much as an investigation, an invocation, a mood. Mlotek reveals personal details piecemeal, wedging them between analyses of...cultural fanfare.
Thoughtful and elegantly equivocal ... Devoid of both dogmatism...and heroine-ism...in a way not always true of its predecessors ... Reading her book can feel like sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an unmarshaled welter of artifacts. There is richness here, and exhilaration, if not quite a thesis about what divorce means either in general or to her ... Disinclined to give either a firm narrative of Mlotek’s own divorce or a theory of the meaning of contemporary marriage. Firm narratives are precisely what people love to confect and clutch at the end of a marriage, or indeed any relationship ... [A] highly intelligent writer.
t is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution ... Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind.
Mlotek seizes divorce, holding her subject against the light and observing its many surfaces, from all angles. The inspection is rigorous—though not intended to be exhaustive—finding variations in narrative possibilities, subtleties in individual experiences, and imperfections in ideological positionings ... Moving fluidly between nonfiction modes of literary journalism, cultural criticism, and life writing ... With great care and attention, Mlotek dispenses commentary in quick succession, comfortably shifting from vast swathes of history to intimate pockets of popular culture, a skillful oscillation between the macro and micro.
While she hints at a number of things that could be said about her relationship and its dissolution, she fails to fully say any of them. Mlotek has a flair for the profoundly and poetically stated, but her style wanders, injected with dramatic segues and self-conscious reflections that muddy the narrative arc rather than illuminate it. In the end, readers are left holding too many disparate threads—some interesting, others provocative, several linguistically elegant—that together create a sort of temperamental wrestling with the function of divorce. An uncertain and stifled stab at understanding the changing significance of marriage and divorce.
