... furious and addictive ... I diagramed Wayward on a paper napkin to show a friend, trying to explain the novel’s hold on me. The lure isn’t just voice or plot ... Sam turns out to be an ideal guide. She’s rash, funny, searching, entirely unpredictable, appalled at her own entitlement and ineffectuality—drawn with a kind of skeptical fondness ... The local pleasures of Spiotta’s writing are sharp, and many: Sam recalling the narcotic pleasure of holding her daughter as a baby, her painful longing and loneliness for it now. Or smaller moments ... So much contemporary fiction swims about in its own theories; what a pleasure to encounter not just ideas about the thing, but the thing itself—descriptions that irradiate the pleasure centers of the brain, a protagonist so densely, exuberantly imagined, she feels like a visitation.
The menopausal (or in this case, perimenopausal) protagonist is rare, which is just one thrilling aspect of Dana Spiotta’s new novel ... Sam burrows into several women’s groups online and in person (Spiotta is highly amusing in her renderings of these; one of the novel’s many pleasures is its humor about the humorless) ... Spiotta’s novel is at once satirical and earnest: Sam asks what she can do to atone for her thoughtless privilege, what role she might play as an agent of change. There’s much comedy in the asking (menopausal feminists delivering deliberately unfunny monologues at open-mic night at the local comedy club prompts an uneasy titter in both the audience and the reader), but the novel makes clear that the answers aren’t straightforward ... Spiotta’s novels are unfailingly dense with life—the textures, digressions, and details thereof—and Wayward is no exception ... Spiotta offers grand themes and beautiful peripheral incidents ... She writes with sly humor and utter seriousness ... For this reader, roughly the same age as Sam Raymond, there is uncommon pleasure in the paradoxes of this climacteric tale.
[A] a comic, vital new novel ... Sam’s unprincipled pursuit of her confused principles gives the novel a loopy energy ... When a wife, not her husband, is the one to indulge a midlife crisis and abandon her family, her behavior is either derided as selfish or championed as subversive. A good novel shouldn’t ask us to choose between those readings, and Spiotta has written a very good novel ... If Wayward has competition in the category of best American novel devoted to the subject of perimenopause, I am not aware of it.
Spiotta is one of the most alert, ambitious, nuanced, and, yes, smartest of our contemporary novelists ... it's the character of Sam herself — messy, hurtful, floundering in late midlife — who's the compelling draw. Recently, I've become aware of the term, 'crossing the crimson bridge' as a fanciful way to refer to menopause; in Wayward, Spiotta endows that passage with all the gravitas and unpredictability it deserves by giving us a heroine who chooses to take a flying leap off 'the crimson bridge' into uncharted territory.
Spiotta’s novel does an impossible task. The depiction of middle age and motherhood, of divorce and Facebook groups and Medium posts to sign to cancel friends, of a shooting of an unarmed boy by the police as Sam walks around town, the realization that the people walking around you at the State Fair aren’t 'good ole America' and they also aren’t strictly gun-toting, racist rednecks either—all the clichés are there and yet Spiotta effortlessly shows this as the very tangible, very American reality that it is ... In the same way that Ben Lerner writes about art, and Rachel Cusk writes about her own views on motherhood and family, Spiotta avoids the clichés and corny nature of these topics, and injects a palatable sense of realness to these normal affairs of life, of growing old in the world and in relationships and the changing nature of parenting. She accomplishes this in a supremely polished and measured prose that strays away from the more DeLillo-heavy style of her previous work. Wayward is a novel that captures middle age in all its charms and ugliness, in a way that seemingly only her and a few authors could manage.
... exhilarating ... while Spiotta’s previous novels run on Didion-like cold fusion, Wayward reads like a burning fever dream, powered by hot fury rather than icy remove. There is a mythic quality to her narration, as well as a dark strain of humor, as if she — like Sam — can’t quite believe the world in which we’ve found ourselves ... a virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.
... breathtaking ... a book that masterfully explores the pressures of being a woman in a society that's hostile to the very fact that you exist, and that refuses to tolerate any attempt to step outside its arbitrary boundaries ... Spiotta cleverly tackles several subjects in her novel, among them childhood, motherhood and misogyny. Wayward is a strikingly intelligent book, sometimes funny, sometimes painful ... It's a brilliant novel with love—never a simple subject—at its core.
... takes on marriage and motherhood — and shatters our safe, tidy concepts of each ... Like all of Spiotta’s work, Wayward examines questions of identity and transformation with a razor-sharp edge. But with born-again Sam, the approach takes on a desperate, almost manic tone without any of the moral payoff ... also peddles heavily in hot-button issues to move the plot along ... Overall, Wayward stands tall in its representation of these harried times. A woman perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough — or breakdown — even after she’s claimed her freedom. Complicated personal and societal goals. Even more complicated solutions. Whether you sign up to go along for the ride might depend on whether you’re still interested in the conversation.
The core of Wayward’s charm lies in what good company Sam is. She dissects many flavors of contemporary delusion and distraction with consummate precision and yet never comes across as waspish or savage. She observes her own desire to imagine herself as 'subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life' with a cool, easy tolerance but zero vanity ... Simmering under Spiotta’s deceptively breezy, fluid description of everyday life in 2017 Syracuse are large and perplexing questions about the eternal interplay of idealism and pragmatism, of the longing for a better world and the reality of human frailty.
It’s an appealing, cross-grained cast of characters and the writing—colloquial, sarcastic, a bit blowsy—is funny and down-to-earth. And yet ultimately the novel is a mess. At about the two-thirds mark, for reasons passing understanding, Ms. Spiotta introduces a sequence of histrionic non sequiturs that carry the once steadily absorbing family drama to a breathless, bathetic ending. The most egregious insertion is a police shooting, a plot twist that parasitizes current events in exactly the cheap way that Sam has come to decry. In these inexplicable final chapters, the novel’s protagonist seems wiser than her own creator.
[The protagonist's] aggrievement and complicity make her an apt representative of the vexed role that white women play in contemporary politics ... A chance encounter late in the novel brings Sam face to face with this reality and challenges her to reckon with her own privilege, although it may be too little, too late ... By connecting Sam’s overprotective parenting to the murder she witnesses, Spiotta points to the ways that white women’s imagined or professed fears are used to justify police violence. This subject is worthwhile to explore on its own, but it is also unsettling that Sam’s epiphany about Ally’s relative security is achieved through the death of another teenager ... if Spiotta easily diagnoses and interrogates these disturbing tendencies in her protagonist, readers cannot evade another question haunting the novel: Is there also something monstrous about Spiotta’s decision to make this murder a turning point in her book? ... One can easily imagine a less gratuitous way that Spiotta could arrange for Sam to encounter the violent realities of racism in the United States. But by displacing Sam’s everyday complicity onto the violence of the officer who kills Mapunda, Spiotta lets her character and her readers off the hook; they are not forced to confront the larger system of violence in which that act had taken place ... If fiction is to successfully confront racism and violence in the United States, it must go beyond a simple restaging of them.
Spiotta is unsurprisingly great on the brute facts of middle age ... Much of Wayward has the glow, if not the urgency or sex appeal, of Spiotta’s previous work ... Even a writer with Spiotta’s prodigious gifts can’t quite engender rapturous admiration for the crossroads of New York State ... But Syracuse winds up being an ideal receptacle for Sam’s ultimate passion, her love of landmark preservation. She gets high off a respectful gut renovation, and her new house is described with radiant precision ... a hugely entertaining tear on the subject of feminist activism ... Even here, Spiotta avoids easy opportunities for ridicule. This is a testament both to her skill and to her fluent knowledge of a character who would like to remove herself from all the histrionics but knows she’s not immune to their source ... Unlike Spiotta’s other work, which feels so smooth in its satire, Wayward starts to read like a checklist of modern plagues ... It’s not just the proper nouns that come flying at the reader, it’s the incidents. The coincidences ... Meanwhile, she happens to be the sole witness to a police shooting, a plot thread that feels thin and a bit hasty ... Strung together, the many 'contemporary issues' that Spiotta describes give the sensation that Wayward is a novel about aging that would prefer to be a novel about an age. They can seem a contortion, an attempt to counterbalance the less-than-cool premise of 'suburban woman having a breakdown' ... It’s credible enough for her to throw various motives at the wall and see what sticks, but this starts to feel as if Spiotta weren’t sure of the answers herself ... It’s a guessing game that threatens to undercut one of the most valuable tenets of this otherwise affecting novel, which is that being a woman in America is enough to make you run for the hills.
... it’s easy to recognize Spiotta’s affinity for Smith’s sensibility. Readers will appreciate how she’s made it uniquely her own in a deeply satisfying character study that’s also a snapshot of American life at an especially perilous moment in the nation’s history ... With a touch that’s never heavy-handed, Spiotta evokes the #MeToo movement (with an interesting twist) and describes a police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager ... never less than fascinating.
... a mordant, coruscating indictment of these times, liberal politics, affluenza, self improvement and social identity ... explores the ironies and frailties of modern life, the human tendency to constantly gaze inward to become better, to move further.
At its sharpest, Wayward channels the feeling that modern life is too fragmented, too distorted to take in fully, much less bend to one’s will. Unfortunately, it often lapses into plotting and conversation so labored and deliberate as to reduce what could be tragedy to mere farce ... That inattention, that inability to see who and what is in front of us, is at the center of Wayward’s most compelling pieces ... too frequently, Wayward strays from that feeling of alienation and into the numbingly obvious. The conversations Sam has with acquaintances about the political state of the world in 2017...are excruciatingly free of subtext or variation ... For all her immense talent, Spiotta has never been a particularly adept writer of dialogue. Hers is often too stilted to be convincingly natural, yet not distinct enough to be truly stylized ... Though the book fails when it attempts, as it so frequently does, to diagnose the current moment, it occasionally taps into something more eternal, and much more unnerving.
... witty, snarky, subversive, and vast but local ... At once a love letter to the Salt City and a smart and introspective device for illuminating the present through the very recent past, this novel flattens the American desire for self-realization in the face of catastrophe.
Spiotta...draws up a love letter to Syracuse, N.Y., in this wonderfully mischievous and witty story ... Spiotta pulls off a surprising dive into the [feminist history] story, which informs Sam’s relationship with her own mother and with Ally while shading in Sam’s interest in local lore. This is a knockout.
Sam processes all this in irrational, woman-on-the-brink ways (keying a truck, a disastrous turn at a stand-up open mic) that are typical in domestic-crisis novels. But Spiotta’s characterization of Sam is more complicated and slippery, as she begins to recognize that the entrapment she feels is as much a function of broader forces she’s helpless to control ... A violent act at the tail end of the novel both clarifies and complicates the predicament, and Spiotta artfully contextualizes Sam’s existential crisis as part of her hometown's history ... An engrossing, interior mother-daughter story that expands into a sharp social commentary.
