The divides between older and younger generations of radicals have always been wide, but Wolitzer's prescience about the coming rift between gender activists in the age of #MeToo feels particularly wise ... For all that the novel obsesses about how women can undermine and betray each other, there's seemingly a blind spot around the question of men. That said, it's nearly impossible to reach the end of the book without feeling optimistic ... here's hoping that quotes from The Female Persuasion will be found on Tumblr blogs and needlepoints everywhere, inspiring a future generation to use them to create something new.
Refreshing though it is to encounter a literary model of genuine female mentorship and encouragement, her tale of a millennial woman’s feminist awakening comes to seem blinkered and strangely incurious ... The risk for a novel that tries to capture the Zeitgeist is that the Zeitgeist is liable to shift at any moment. Indeed, the timeliness of Wolitzer’s subject, initially such a boon to the novel, ultimately deals it a major blow. The events of the past few months, and the fierce discussions about feminism that they have engendered, have proved to be far more electrifying and complex than anything that Wolitzer depicts here. Surpassed by the present that it aims to depict, the novel feels amiable and mild by comparison, already quaintly out of date.
...there’s more to Wolitzer’s fiction than timeliness. Much like her last book, The Interestings, her latest is an absorbing read that follows a handful of uncommonly sympathetic characters as they charge and muddle through decades of their lives, exploring their changing relationships with each other and their evolving attitudes towards what constitutes a successful, fulfilling life ... The Female Persuasion is a big book with room for multiple dualities in its pages: disillusionment along with inspiration, compromises along with dreams, vulnerability along with strength, betrayal along with loyalty, and heartache as well as joy. It is an earnest, heartening reminder of the importance of learning to navigate all these states and never give up — even when the situation seems particularly bleak and demoralizing.
It feels weirdly coy, right now, reading a novel concerned with contemporary women’s issues whose real-world reference points are draped in a perfunctory veil of fictionality...For a book that strives to capture an era in which feminism became a dependable pop-culture brand, The Female Persuasion offers a sparsely populated cultural landscape ... Wolitzer’s tin ear for pop culture comes to feel like an author’s inability to either authoritatively capture the things of her world as they exist or else invent a world compelling on its own terms ... The youth are out there naming names, demanding change, maintaining a briny sense of humor. Meanwhile, at the end of The Female Persuasion, thirty-one-year-old Greer has something strongly resembling 'it all': a baby, a best seller, and a brownstone. It’s a happy ending, fantastical and very old-fashioned.
I felt so seen by the book that I started to feel something else: manipulated. Loving The Female Persuasion felt as shamefully predictable as clicking on an Anthropologie ad on Facebook and ordering the dress it kept showing me, proving myself to be exactly the person Facebook ad data suggests I’d be. Of course I loved the book. It’s perfectly designed to make a person like me love it ... The novel seems to have been written for a more slickly packaged feminist era than this one ? for a Hillary Clinton presidency, or at least for a past world in which such a presidency felt like a sparkling inevitability rather than a tattered, flawed impossibility. Feminism looks different now, or, at least, there’s broad agreement it should ... a novel sifting through the small failures (and huge successes) of a prominent young white feminist hardly feels like a major statement about the movement. In 2018, aren’t there more vital, surprising and layered stories to tell?
With insight and wit, Wolitzer illuminates the compromises the young woman is willing to make, starting with the small and personal ... Running through the book is the central theme of power and its moral ambiguities, or, as Zee puts it most accurately: 'how to act in the face of power'. Whether it’s the question of how to handle the power of family dynamics or the worship of the powerful that leads to the betrayal of a friend, Wolitzer tackles these issues with gusto, while never losing sight of the story she wants to tell. It would be easy to praise the novel for its timely political message, being released six months into the #metoo movement. But timeliness is never enough to make a book ‘good’. Neither are big ideas. What you need are authentic characters and a compelling story. And The Female Persuasion excels on both counts.?
...[an] exuberant, sprawling novel, which may be Wolitzer’s most ambitious yet ... Some of the best scenes in this book are from Cory’s or Zee’s perspectives, as Wolitzer follows them through college and into their 20s, where their stories gain a thrilling — if also heartbreaking — momentum ... Wolitzer is known as a seriously funny chronicler of both the minutiae and sweep of modern American life, capable of storytelling as moving as it is acerbic, and all this is on fine display in The Female Persuasion ... if at times her characters can sound a little too on-point, if her ending is a little too tidy, these faults are easy to forgive, because what she has written is not a speech but a novel, one that’s big, necessary, and utterly persuasive.
Greer is yet another female protagonist in a long line of them in contemporary fiction for whom the reader develops very little sympathy, much less hope ... Her book smarts do not translate to any visible intelligence, and Wolitzer employs prosaic language to describe her ... There’s a fair amount of sex in The Female Persuasion, none of which sounds like the sex people actually have, nor provides the characters anything but cursory insight into what should be an essential part of any conversation about liberation ... In the vacuum of language that doesn’t reduce female personhood to tits and ass, Wolitzer has done little to improve the tenor of fiction’s treatment of female bodies. She describes Greer’s 'tapering waist, and a vagina that menstruated in its secret, brilliant way each month' ... Wolitzer paints with a broad brush that doesn’t capture any of the nuance in actual twentysomethings’ lives ... The search for this era’s Great American Novel continues.
[Wolitzer] writes in warm, specific prose that neither calls attention to itself nor ignores the mandate of the best books: to tell us things we know in ways we never thought to know them ... The book itself is an ambitious 456 pages, tight but inclusive, and deserves to be placed on shelves alongside such ornate modern novels beginning in college as A Little Life, The Secret History and The Marriage Plot ... Wolitzer is an infinitely capable creator of human identities that are as real as the type on this page, and her love of her characters shines more brightly than any agenda.
Wolitzer is clearly interested in puncturing the idealized definition of a mentor? but falls short of questioning the innate flaws of this very model of mentorship ... what the novel doesn’t ask is if Greer might have succeeded in spite of Faith, rather than because of her. If it were up to Faith, Greer would not have struck out on her own. She would still be working in her morally compromised job on projects further and further removed from the mission of helping women that initially inspired her ... The Female Persuasion falls disappointingly short of upsetting these outdated power structures; instead, it further invests in a future bound by the same roles that have been so limiting to its characters.
It has been billed as the novel for the #MeToo era, and it deftly interweaves the political with the personal, to subvert the old feminist mantra. It is a perfect riposte to those who lament that writing about feminism, harassment and relations between the sexes is dull. Wolitzer...does so with verve and wit. As she makes clear, surely misconduct and ambition are integral components of storytelling ... The author examines the delicate interplay between ambition and idealism, taking a swipe at elitist feminism. Yet she never loses sight of the characters’ relationships and skilfully chronicles the bumpy road of young love and professional malaise. The writing is clear and smart, never laboured or pleased with itself; there are so many well-crafted observations ... If #MeToo has knocked the reputations of a few literary giants, it is also creating—or, in the case of Wolitzer, cementing—new ones.
The Female Persuasion is a wonderfully solid book, luxuriously long and varied in an almost 19th century kind of way ... The Female Persuasion unpicks these tensions but doesn't indulge them, preferring to show feminism as an ecosystem rather than an arrow ... who cares whether she nails the exact cadences of teenage speech if she can evoke so achingly that mixture of certainty and cluelessness, desire and ineptitude, that comes with being a young person?
Wolitzer is at her best when dropping wry but casual observations. The pages are peppered with little bonbons of accuracy as well as more poignant truths ... For all its tongue-clucking over Greer’s snobbery, though, the narrative itself has a strangely snobbish cast. To be given full narrative weight, or even passing approval, characters must be either preternaturally good or hyperintelligent, preferably both ... More seriously, Wolitzer’s prose is oddly resistant to intensity ... [the] trauma feels gravely out of proportion, not because it is implausible, but because the narrative never quite stretches to accommodate it.
Like Faith Frank, Wolitzer seems to preside serenely over her powers, demonstrating a grasp of pacing and characterization that feels simultaneously God-given and earned over years of hard work ... If we try too hard to parse the precise tenor of feminism embodied by the book, we risk missing a note of gentle satire, and indeed its critiques of its own milieu ... If Wolitzer is astute on the white-collar world of millennials, she is just as canny about the gross 20th-century marriage of do-goodery with corporate razzle-dazzle ... The Female Persuasion is a genuine pleasure to read, and it feels confident without being complacent.
Despite its politics, The Female Persuasion is far from being a polemic. Wolitzer devotes substantial portions of the book not only to Greer’s and Faith’s backstories, but to those of Cory and Zee, Greer’s college friend, all warmly told ... In some ways The Female Persuasion seems very much of the moment, from Greer’s nasty #MeToo moment in college to Loci’s projects to rescue human trafficking victims. But what’s really striking is how nostalgic much of it seems. Although most of the plot takes place no more than a decade ago, it’s lit with the warm glow of an era of progressive politics, when it felt as if feminism, gay rights and other human rights were blooming, if not fully realized then on the path.
If something positive can come from our current political climate — what Wolitzer calls 'the big terribleness' — it is almost certainly this ambitious new novel ... Wolitzer understands — seemingly on a cellular level — the puzzled, needy heart that beats within any teenager ... Wolitzer is also startlingly perceptive about young adulthood, or whatever that murky, unmoored time in your mid-20s is called ... The Female Persuasion may fall short of perfection, but it’s still plenty strong enough to remind us that we can change the world, one woman at a time, even in the big terribleness.
Wit and description are a few of Wolitzer’s many strengths...Such moments brighten prose that is often exposition-heavy, perhaps because Wolitzer slogs through the childhoods of all four central characters ... Occasional plot devices aside, the work masterfully captures the highs, lows and unexpected twists of the idealistic life.
It’s not wrong to say that Wolitzer writes 'women’s fiction,' in that she draws fully formed female characters who speak to each other and have faceted ambitions and inner lives. But she’s also a keen humanist with a singular gift for social observation. And though Greer’s story may be ripe for timely 2018 hashtags, it’s not really just hers. Persuasion has three other often more compelling narratives inside it: Cory, Zee, and Faith, supporting players who become, in their own ways, the book’s thrumming heart.
Wolitzer’s social commentary can be as funny as it is queasily on target ... Wolitzer offers readers a lot to chew on as she skewers the righteous and self-righteous with humor and poignancy. But in the end her sharp observations soften. The things that incite our fury and ambition may seem overwhelming, but it’ll all work out in the end.
Wolitzer has a knack of spreading time like it’s butter. The effect is oddly dizzying—having sat with this story for the equivalent of 50 years, the reader finally looks up from the page with the disconcerting realisation she knows even the most minor character better than her own son. Suddenly we’ve lapped ourselves, arriving at a party to celebrate Greer’s bestselling Lean In-type book, Outside Voices (a too-neat reference to her first conversation with Faith) ... Unlike a women’s summit, nobody will come away from this novel feeling either tipsy or empowered. There are no free keyrings. Instead, it asks us to consider the state of contemporary feminism and the ways we use pedestals ... With affection and generosity, Wolitzer exposes the limits of power through a handful of well-meant lives and she leaves us uneasy. The sense that we may have smashed a glass ceiling, but now are standing in the shards, discreetly bleeding.
The sructure is handled deftly, except for the occasional story told twice from not particularly different perspectives, and the framing of Faith’s biography as a long reminiscence told from a massage table ... there’s a lot of comedic potential here, but Wolitzer mostly squanders it by marvelling too often at the beautiful journey that is life, turning the entire concept—living itself—into a cliché. Her omniscient narrator frequently produces odd formalities, such as using a character’s full name though we’ve already seen it many times, using ‘for’ as a conjunction to mean ‘because’, and veering into the parental ... The young characters in The Female Persuasion speak in stilted dialogue, narrating fully formed ideas in a distant version of the way millennials talk ... Yet in a strange way this novel, at 464 pages, also seems written for online readers. With broad strokes that assert nuance with the opposite of nuance, Wolitzer has represented what it’s like to be a certain kind of woman who grew up in the last decade—the kind who reflexively cares about other ‘women’s stories’, who understands that her own is not extraordinary and doesn’t know what to do about it, who can solve all her problems (and earn a handsome living) by, to paraphrase [Nora] Ephron, treating them as copy.
...a big book on the hot-button subject of feminism that seems, like its predecessor, ambivalent about its attention-grabbing scope and topicality ... Ms. Wolitzer is very smart about the gritty realpolitik of activist movements, both in the concessions they make to corporate money and in the cutthroat tactics their leaders use to gain acclaim ... Curiously, the ancillary storylines about Zee and Cory are the novel’s most affecting portions ... Near the end of The Female Persuasion Greer comes to realize that even flawed messages have the power to encourage and inspire. In that sense the novel is a meaningful statement, a drawn-out work on big issues written by a woman at the pinnacle of her career. Still, I missed the perfect short book hidden somewhere inside it.
Sweeping yet intimate, Wolitzer’s timely saga places her characters at the heart of a new wave of feminism, one clinging to the old paradigms of protest while encompassing current politics of personal responsibility. In a complex web of friends, lovers, mentors, and rivals, Wolitzer compassionately and artfully discerns the subtle strengths at the core of these essential connections.
...the novel eschews a simplistic, idealized view of mentorship and influence, or of friendship. Elements of complication — competitiveness, resentment, selfishness, rationalization and moral compromise — run side by side with nobler instincts, handled in a way that doesn’t make the characters less likable, only more real ... The Female Persuasion is the best kind of social novel — a brilliant book about relationships set against a backdrop of principles, movements and change.
Much has already been written about Meg Wolitzer’s lengthy new novel The Female Persuasion, calling it everything from the 'Great American Novel' to retro elitist white middle-class feminism. I would argue that this novel is neither of those but exhibits both elements of genius and significant limitations for a twenty-first century feminist novel ... While there are issues about the use of various tropes and criticisms surrounding so-called 'second wave' feminism throughout the novel, there are larger issues of structure that can frustrate the reader. The novel starts out with two main characters (Greer and Faith), but midway through we are given long sections dedicated to the other people in Greer’s life. While these sections do serve to give added depth to these other characters, they leave Greer and the main narrative of the novel mostly on hold while we work through some one hundred pages of minor narratives ... Wolitzer’s attempts to be inclusive are often clunky (as an example, she tries to slip the word “trans” into the novel in a brief inessential passage). What The Female Persuasion is not is a viable manifesto for modern feminism, but what it is is a mostly well-wrought narrative of two white women ... It’s a story about a young woman, an older woman, and two of the young woman’s friends; it’s not a guide for twenty-first century feminism, and it’s both limiting and unfair to treat it as more than what it is—a good novel.
Topicality aside, it’s simply a great book. Part of that greatness might also be its biggest weakness, depending on the reader. The novel is committed to a holistic sense of balance — to showing us the inner lives of a full ensemble of characters in colorful, compelling depth ... Whether you view these explorations of character as fascinating or distracting will largely determine how much you enjoy the book. They do slow down the story’s urgency ... But urgency is not really the point of a novel like this. Crisp language that observes and describes characters with empathy, wit, and insight—that’s where The Female Persuasion excels ... Wolitzer’s novel succeeds on every level by refusing the easy road for the complex one, giving us characters who clash, wound, disappoint, panic, recover, and thrive—life in all its messy modern glory.
Each character gets chapters that go deep inside their heads. There's a lot of inner monologue, sometimes to a fault. The issues are complex, certainly, but some readers may wish the characters would simply act rather than reading paragraphs about what might happen if they do ... Wolitzer's talent as a writer shines in lines that say more in a sentence than most writers do in paragraphs ... There's much more to admire here as the novel ponders friendship, love and parent-child relationships. But in the end, Wolitzer's real gift to her readers is a story that feels both timeless and very much of the zeitgeist.
...[a] cheerful, sprawling and well-meaning novel ... In this era of call-outs and take-downs, Wolitzer reinforces a more old-fashioned concept: no one is perfect ... Sharp observations about status anxiety, social pretensions and upper-middle-class sexual mores are Wolitzer specialities. They offer welcome relief from the novel’s facile politics–eye-catching seashells on long stretches of deserted beach. The novel rambles too much and has too many main characters ... she’s less interested in scoring points than in presenting engaging characters. In that realm, the novel is sporadically successful. The moral of her story is that women owe it to each other, and to the world, to be their best selves. Now there’s a feminist message we can all find persuasive, if far from revolutionary.
Through it all the reader holds her breath and flips the pages, enraptured by the magic Wolitzer makes on the page. Born of equal passion for her message and the characters she crafts to deliver it, The Female Persuasion, like all of Wolitzer’s novels, is timely, but also timeless. Headlines notwithstanding, it’s not that Meg Wolitzer is catching up to the world. The world, as usual, is catching up to her.
These Sisyphean examples of feminist life are what propel the novel forward, more so than character or plot. The Female Persuasion slices into issue after issue: corruption in low-resource charities, threats to women in online gaming, illegal abortion in the 1960s, the politics of cleaning someone else’s house for money, the heroin epidemic and coming of age during the Great Recession in 2008 ... Wolitzer is often insightful and arresting ... With the #MeToo movement fresh in the headlines, The Female Persuasion could not come at a better time.
Wolitzer is astutely aware of the larger social and historical forces that continuously oppress women, but her deconstruction of these mechanisms is glib. As a result, The Female Persuasion exalts white privileged feminism and fails to subvert oppression ... The strongest moment of The Female Persuasion is the depiction of abortion access and Wolitzer's commentary on reproductive justice ... Wolitzer is an aware author who clearly understands how matrices of power oppress and subjugate. Yet her characters only occasionally check their power or privilege. They even more seldomly step back to question why society accepts institutionalized oppression. It's maddening to see Wolitzer acknowledge these systems as The Female Persuasion remains inert.
Her characters don’t always do the right thing, and though she has compassion for all of them, she’s ruthless about revealing their compromises and treacheries. This symphonic book feels both completely up-to-the-minute and also like a nod to 1970s feminist classics such as The Women’s Room, with a can't-put-it-down plot that illuminates both its characters and larger social issues. The perfect feminist blockbuster for our times.
Wolitzer writes with an easy, engrossing style, and her eye for detail seamlessly connects all the dots in the book's four major story lines. This insightful and resonant novel explores what it is to both embrace womanhood and suffer because of it.
