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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Alan is initially the only parent at her children's school in whom Amanda can confide -- she even considers having an affair with him! -- but he ends up being a laughingstock. A playwright, Alan invites her to one of his shows, which he describes as "a challenging new perspective on wealth, homelessness, AIDS" (hardy har-har -- do conservatives actually laugh at these jokes?). But the only venue he can find for his play is an old-age home, and even its decrepit, eccentric residents walk out before the curtain falls. What a loser! Or, to be more Crittendenesque, what a wuss! A fem!
Maybe I'm overreacting because my husband stayed home with our daughter for a year and a half, and I didn't notice him turning into a soprano. I did notice, however, that he and my daughter developed a strong, layered attachment, one I wished I'd had with my dad. Actually, my husband (before he decided to stay home) worked for the Justice Department, the same place where the "mighty tree" toiled, so how could he be all bad? And unlike antitrust attorney Bob, he didn't need any 11th-hour conversion to set him to right: My man was a criminal prosecutor for seven years, an assistant U.S. attorney who put the bad guys behind bars -- you don't get more macho than that.
But the real surprise about "Amanda Bright@home" is that, other than Amanda, not one parent who cares for children full-time is the least bit content or likable. Sure, you'd expect Crittenden to diss working parents. (Although the couple across the street merit only one short paragraph, readers learn that they left home "early in the morning and returned late at night," "wore government security passes but not wedding rings," and that she makes a "brief fuss over the children" when she sees them, while he regards them as "weeds that needed pulling." Fortunately, once the federal government is reduced to its proper limited role, such people will disappear.) But like Alan, all the stay-at-home moms in Amanda's mother's group are inexplicably contemptible. Two of them are utter bores; the other two not-so-secretly miss their high-powered careers and channel their competitive energy into perfecting their children, their bodies (a full face-lift for a 40-year-old is a minor plot line) or their already perfect homes.
By default, Amanda is the example all of us frazzled working mothers should follow. She's not a particularly authentic or inspiring one, however. Awaiting the birth of her third child, with her two older ones in school, Amanda volunteers part-time at a library, and eventually, after all her kids are in school, plans to pursue a teaching degree. I've got nothing against teaching, but the job doesn't come with the kinds of demands that test Crittenden's thesis, which is that a woman can knock off working in her 20s and return to a high-powered profession in her early to mid-30s.
I'd argue that the main reason Crittenden herself, a Toronto native, is a (partial) poster girl for her new feminine ideal -- she got married at 25 and had her first two children by 30 -- is that she's had a pretty exceptional life. When she was a girl, her divorced mother married a man who became the founding editor of the Toronto Sun, a conservative tabloid, and young Danielle spent much of her teens writing book reviews and features. She skipped college, and by 20, she told Mirabella magazine, she was a "swashbuckling foreign correspondent" traveling the world. In other words, when she married Frum, the heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune, she'd already had the career success most of us conventional college gals couldn't dream of realizing until after our 30th birthdays. Like Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the more recent champion of early childbearing, who despite already having four children with the same man endured five years of grueling infertility treatments to have a fifth at 51, Crittenden's unusual run doesn't inspire confidence in her theory.
Then again, maybe Crittenden isn't really trying to reach women who are as passionate about their careers as they are their children. Amanda reveals early on that, secretly, she hated her P.R. job. And even though Crittenden has spilled a lot of ink suggesting that women can reverse the order of family- and career-building without cheating either, maybe "AmandaBright@home" is actually targeted to women who prefer child rearing to jobs that are more grinding than fulfilling (certainly not uncommon), as well as to old traditionalists, readers who believe a woman should know her place, and that place is at home. The novel's unflattering portrayal of stay-at-home moms raises some doubts about this theory, but Amanda's Woolf-lite childbirth epiphany supports it. Right-wing political rants are a hot new niche in publishing: Could it be that Crittenden is hoping that the hardcore conservatives who put lunatic Ann Coulter on the bestseller list for months are just dying to read a "good" novel, one in which the men are men and the women share Amanda's special talents? By the end of the book, she's learned to clean house (her nasty feminist mother never taught her, of course) and to greet her hubby with a Scotch at the end of a hard day at the office. What mighty tree could ask for more?
