A clever, well-argued and thoroughly joyless examination of what Lenz calls the 'commonplace horror' of marriage ... In making her case, Lenz sometimes fails to consider counterarguments ... Of course there are many, many times that a marriage is insupportable — and a bad marriage, as Lenz notes, is one of the loneliest states imaginable. Thank God, and the law, that we can be free. But is this really an argument against marriage in general? What if freedom is not most people’s goal?
A light mix of history and social commentary that leans heavily on personal storytelling without quite turning into memoir. Common though it is, this hybrid form is tough to pull off. It can tempt writers to map their own experiences too neatly onto collective ones while also undermining the specificity and perspective that a good memoir needs. This American Ex-Wife suffers from both of these problems. Lenz’s impulse to generalize is so strong that at times her work whiffs of self-help ... When she describes their relationship, her prose is alive with anguish; when she describes leaving, it sparks with joy. But she rarely writes in this mode for long. Almost without exception, her personal stories give way to exhortations to readers ... It’s plainly intended to be inspirational ... Moments demonstrate her conviction that it is her role to bear public witness to women’s marital suffering. She also seems convinced that all women married to men must suffer. Such dramatic certainty creates a variety of insensitivities, as total confidence tends to ... Lynz...habitually shifts from personal modes of writing to emphatic suggestions that readers follow her lead ... By turning her story into an archetype, she omits the nuance that might have made it resonate.
While it might be tempting to shrug off Lenz’s argument because of her unlucky (and that’s a nice word for it) coupling, the data here is persuasive ... Can be exhilarating or worrying, depending on the status of the person reading it. What ultimately makes it compelling, whatever one’s feelings about straight marriage, is the sheer joy that Lenz so obviously experiences as a single woman.
A raw, angry, rabble-rousing book ... The book is wrongly framed, reaching too often for sweeping pronouncements about sex and gender ... The connection between their domestic miseries and the evangelical political agenda, between her husband’s Trumpism and the inequalities in their marriage, would have been a great subject to explore, but Lenz turns to generalities instead. It’s a very didactic book... but the lessons are rote ones ... This framing is too bad, because when Lenz observes the world she knows... she’s textured and insightful.
Scorching ... Lenz’s arguments about the inequalities baked into traditional marriages don’t break much new ground, but they gain immediacy thanks to her fiery tone. This is galvanizing stuff.
