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Fiction. Literature. HTML:A New York Times Bestseller â??A powerful coming-of-age story that looks at ambition, friendship, identity, desire, and power from the much-needed female lens." â??Bustle â??Ultra-readable.â?ť â??Vogue From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Interestings, comes an electric novel not just about who we want to be with, but who we want to be. To be admired by someone we admireâ??we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world. Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the womenâ??s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greerâ??madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she canâ??t quite placeâ??feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future sheâ??d always imagined. Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. Itâ??s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within al… (more)
User reviews
Book Club Suitability- Whether by fortune or design, The Female Persuasion strongly evokes the current touchstones of the #metoo movement. It rightly earns top marks for relatable storytelling and the currency of the issues will yield fertile ground for discussion.
Although the novel was probably meant to illustrate the abuse of women and to support a change in that environment, I did not feel it accomplished that goal, nor did I feel that it was authentic in its approach. There seemed
I found few narratives with pure causes or appropriately moral behavior. Of course corporate greed was a major villain in the book, but so were the people who ran feminist organizations once they entered the mainstream market. Most of the characters were flawed. Many of them were willing to compromise ethics in order to serve their own needs.
While reading this, I questioned why so many female authors seem to feel they have to pepper their books liberally with filthy language, unacceptable under most circumstances, and sex that veers close to what once was called pornography. It diminishes their credibility in my eyes and diminishes the quality of the book. When a book masquerades as an important piece of writing, but is really a political message, using low class language, it is disappointing. I do not feel that I have to use my mouth as a toilet in order to compete or to be strong or acceptable.
At times, I found the dialogue defied reality in its innocent simplicity when it came from the mouths of supposed geniuses. In order to satisfy the needs of the current PC culture, the author included all sorts of liberal themes. The reader is confronted with words like cisgender and trans. There are lesbians and homosexuals. There are Latinos, and of course, they are super moral and hard-working, but poor; there are inappropriate jokes about Jews and race, however, and completely inappropriate language is used in normal conversation. Personally, I have no interest in homosexual sex or in women who are portrayed as weak and mindless, unfeminine and loud. Frankly, I am tired of the progressive agenda infecting all of the literature that is being produced today. When it is not overt, it is hidden in the various messages and themes that are subtly presented. I am being bombarded with a belief system I do not necessarily support 100%.
The “heroine” worship of the characters portrayed as feminists, coupled with their dysfunctional personalities, only made me wonder why the feminist movement ever even caught on. It felt as if in order to participate in the movement, one had to exhibit some kind of anger, disappointment or dysfunction of personality or goal. I wondered, what did feminists really want? From this book, I got the impression it was fame, fortune, and, as a by-product, perhaps more freedom for women. Did the end justify the means?
Abortion, of course, was front and center, portrayed as a magic bullet or cure-all for the world’s ills. Women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, LGBT issues, gender terms, sexual freedom, misogyny, an unjust judicial system when it came to adjudicating the abuse of women, and drug abuse are major themes introduced but not all are broadly developed; some seemed as if they were introduced as propaganda. Filial devotion and responsibility, parenting or lack thereof, and parent/child relationships were more heavily developed with the emphasis on maturity moving the characters to be more accepting of their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
The main character is Greer Kadetsky. She is disappointed with her parents’ parenting skills. She wants more attention and discipline than they are willing to provide. Her parents are very much into their own personal satisfaction and pleasure. Greer’s parents are atheists who were often high on marijuana. They are left over hippies. Her best friend, Zee, is a lesbian. She may be Jewish, judging from her name and residence. She comes from Scarsdale, a suburb of Westchester heavily populated by people of the Jewish faith. Both of her parents are judges. They are the stereotypical Jewish family, educated and people of the book. She is portrayed stereotypically as financially solvent, as well. She is wealthy, but unsatisfied with her life which feels meaningless. She tries to please her parents rather than herself. She identifies happily as female but prefers females to males. Both Greer and Zee come from “white privilege”. Greer’s boyfriend is a Latino who has hard-working parents who pay attention to his needs. They are sterling examples until a tragic accident alters all of their expectations and futures. Faith Frank is the woman that Greer idolizes. She is a fraternal twin, from Brooklyn. She is not close to her brother. She is portrayed as aging and self-serving, but also as a great communicator. She is a prominent activist for women’s rights and Greer winds up working with her.
Regarding sexual abuse, many of the women perceive it in varying proportions, from groping to rape, with all intervening stages as almost equal in injustice. They are very offended by what they perceive as bad behavior in most men, however, they sometimes seem to encourage the poor behavior and to tolerate it for the sake of their own advancement. This makes them somewhat complicit in my eyes. I think the book fails in its attempt to adequately promote the causes women wish to highlight. Also, there are men who are abusive to women, who have unreal expectations of what liberties they are allowed to take, but they are not in the majority, in my experience. In the book, the reader is made to feel that every man has the tendency to take advantage of a female.
I did not feel that the author authentically presented this issue of women’s rights. She became too embroiled with reproductive rights and the PC culture, which was to the detriment of the issues in the workplace environment and injustice to women in general. Too many of the feminists were unhappy and sexually confused and the men who supported them did not seem masculine, as if someone with masculine tendencies had to be driven by his sex organ, not his brain or his heart. The ending was too much like a fairy tale with everyone finding their nirvana.
Of Wolitzer's books, I still like The Interestings best, but this was good, and a fast read. The character development was strong except for Faith, who didn't always feel real to me. Also, having been there in the flesh, I know that the portrayal of second-wave feminism as dominated by affluent white women with their corporate sponsors is a grotesque caricature. But hey, fiction, and this was fun.
Wolitzer's style draws readers in - Her characterizations and almost tender, sympathetic details help us immediately embody any character she chooses to focus on. I think her portraits of the male characters were almost as strong as the female ones. Very much an examination of the American feminist movement but without the didactic historical novel approach. As I noted in another one of her books, The Interestings, she dwells in New York City- Eastern state(s) setting & moves back & forth between several characters, so some criticize her sometimes wandering plotlines..but I found it engaging, and some of her insightful lines I wanted to copy down somewhere... and ponder later. Her interest in the themes of female friendships takes center stage here - with lots to enjoy. Definitely a book club worthy read!
Quotes: "She had been absorbed in her own unhappiness, practically curating it."
"The boys aerosolizing themselves with a body spray called Stadium, which seemed to be half pine sap, half A1 Steak Sauce."
"She still owned a whole color spectrum of boots, which let everyone know she had once been a knockout, a sexual powerhouse, and maybe still was."
"Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. It would always be part of her view of the world. Greer understood it was hard to escape herself."
"Did you ever think of poisoning our teacher?" Elise casually asked her one day.
"no, " Greer said.
"Yeah, neither do I," said Elise.
"The male faculty in their oatmeal tweed and low-slung corduroys that revealed their deflated, tenured asses, and from the female faculty in shaggy, earthy, academic, latter-day Stevie Nicks dress, ambling into the long, less frequently tenured rest of their lives."
"This was New York, where famous people drank from the same trough you did."
"Greer wondered if everyone had a certain degree of awfulness inside them."
"People's marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand."
"Throughout her life, intermittently fearing her parents' eventual deaths, the only positive aspect about that inevitability was that finally there would be no one on earth who would say to her, "Would it kill you to wear a skirt?"
First, the whole white middle class feminism and the first world problem aspects. These are certainly justifiable comments about the work but, I believe, it does not mean the novel is any more or less good based on those very simplistic observations. Rather I think it speaks to both Wolitzer's known world (and writers generally write about what they know so to say she shouldn't write this would be to say she shouldn't write about her experience with feminism, and I am not interested in silencing any writer) and, yes, the world of these particular feminists. More importantly for the novel itself is the story of people, humans experiencing life as they know it. I understand a reader deciding not to read about them, even if it is only because of their privilege within society and feminism. But to do so also for that reason alone is to ignore the common humanity of these characters with every one of us. These are human conflicts and issues as well as being a part of a larger sociological discourse, and to ignore either because of the other seems every bit as exclusionary as the complaints leveled against many such feminists.
Having gotten that out of the way, I was swayed positively by the writing itself. No doubt it is not to everyone's liking, but anyone who makes hyperbolic statements about her "inability" to write or express herself is using absurd hyperbole to vent some other internal issue. I wish people would approach reality when they write these reviews. Wolitzer knows how to write and does so quite well. Not to everyone's taste but then no writer ever has, so that is very good company.
I was less convinced about some of the interactions. I think what I found difficult was that I understood what a lot of the feelings and motivations were but I just wasn't convinced that the chosen actions and words are what the characters would have done. That disconnect kept me from being more enthusiastic about the book.
Yet I also found many scenes to be so wonderful, mostly in the way they portrayed aspects of relationships, personal and working. I could see these scenes, even some of the ones I questioned in the previous paragraph, quite vividly. Some paralleled moments in my own life so touched me a bit more.
I would recommend this to anyone interested in a moderately-paced story about relationships between women, between mentor and mentored, and between one's ideal perception of oneself versus what one becomes (and how we deal with any discrepancy). If you can accept that this is not about a world Wolitzer wouldn't know, and also that there is not much in the way of regret about how things were done, there is a great deal to like here. If you expect a novel to teach you something new about any feminisms of the past or present then you probably won't be satisfied. I can offer a substantial reading list from past courses but even that would have holes and gaps, so maybe take whatever we can from every single source, positively move on from what doesn't help us (without counterproductive hyperbolic criticism for not being what it could never have been), and always look to do what we believe to be right.
Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads.
SUMMARY
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman at Ryland College. She’s there because her parents could not fill out the financial aid forms that would have yielded her entry into
Greer and Cory had been a couple since high school.They had planned on going to college together, but that didn’t happen. Cory was accepted at Yale, while Greer was relegated to Ryland college. Though hundreds of miles apart their relationship survived, and they made plans for after graduation. But once again things didn’t work out as planned for either Greer or Cory. Greer’s best friend, Zee who’s is gay, is also struggling to make a difference in the world. She too wanted to work for Faith Frank.
“I think there are two kinds of feminist. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they’re supposed to do, and don’t get a lot of credit for it, and don’t have someone out there every day telling them they’re doing an awesome job.”
REVIEW
THE FEMALE PERSUASION is a novel about a young woman who is trying to find her place in the world. It about a woman trying to figure out who she is supposed to be and who she is suppose to be with. It’s about the obstacles in her life that prevented her from achieving the things she thought she was supposed to be doing. While the writing was great I found reading it to be a struggle at times, and my interest sometimes faltered. The story was long but interestingly raised a variety of social issues that played significant role in the narrative: privilege, personal/professional ethics, and family responsibility to name just a few. The modern day feminism aspect of the book left a little to be desired.
The people in Greer’s life, her best-friend, Zee, her boyfriend, Cory and her mentor, Faith, all played pivotal roles in guiding Greer’s decisions and impacting her life. Greer’s character was at times frustrating, she left me waiting for her to evolve into a stronger, bolder character. All characters were well developed and I particularly liked Cory, and how he handled the difficulties he faced after graduation.
Meg Wolitzer is a New York Times best selling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife and Sleepwalking. I listened to the audio version of the book, which was narrated by Rebecca Lowman. Publisher Penguin Random House Audio. Publication Date April 3, 2018.
“I do it for women. Not everyone agrees with the way I do it. Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism. The kind of feminism I’ve practice is one way to go about it. There are plenty of others, and that’s great. There are impassioned and radical young women out there, telling multiple stories. I applaud them. We need them. We need as many women fighting as possible. I learned that early on from the wonderful Gloria Steinem - the world is big enough for different kinds of feminist to coexist, people who want to emphasize different aspects of the fight for equality. God knows the injustices are endless, and I am going to use whatever resources are at my disposal to fight in the way I know how.”
An I interesting look at several generations fighting for female equality. Very timely considering the Me too movement, the women's march in DC, and interestingly enough I thought of the Never Again movement with its
I liked this book for its unblinking look at relationships and how over time everything changes.
Excellent book. Second I've read by this author. Will seek more.
This book is much more than a feminist screed, though many gems on the subject can be found within its pages. We are also given several deep and complex characters and their relationships, through which Wolitzer explores themes of self-discovery, betrayal, and idealism.
The Female Persuasion felt, to me (a feminist from back in
These are big issues, and their treatment within this story was worthy and also entertaining and often very funny. Good stuff.