Meg Wolitzer's Timely New Novel Pits Millennial Women Against Their Boomer Idols

Remember how naively optimistic you were in college? You knew the world wasn’t perfect but thought you could make it better with passion and hard work.

That wide-eyed hopefulness, and the vague sense of subsequent disillusionment, is at the center of Meg Wolitzer’s 12th adult novel, The Female Persuasion.

Here, we're introduced to Greer Kadetsky, a freshman at a fictional New England college, who meets—and becomes enamored of—Faith Frank, a 60-something feminist icon with traces of Gloria Steinem. Fortuitously, after graduating she moves to New York and starts working for Frank’s foundation.

Like Wolitzer’s best-selling 2013 novel The Interestings, The Female Persuasion follows its four protagonists, Greer, Faith, Greer’s boyfriend Cory and her best friend Zee, over the following years, as Greer gains perspective on the realities of do-gooderism and what it means to have an idol. We watch Greer struggle to maintain her relationship with Zee, and Faith reckon with the compromises she's made—namely selling a more watered-down brand of feminism than she might have imagined—in order to effect any level of change. As is notable for a book so flagrantly about womanhood, the most compelling character is actually Cory, who morphs from teen heartthrob to soul-selling finance-guy to grim, shell-shocked recluse, in the wake of a terrible tragedy.

As always, readers delight in Wolitzer’s pitch-perfect language and keen attunement to the way real people actually behave. (Anyone who’s ever been in a young-love, long-distance relationship will feel the angst of Greer and Cory’s phone calls.) But where The Interestings felt 100 percent relatable, The Female Persuasion has moments that come across as overly convenient. (Maybe it’s the jaded New Yorker in us, but we rolled our eyes when Greer lands her dream job straight out of college and is immediately able to afford her own apartment.) Thankfully, Wolitzer is careful to acknowledge Greer’s privileged white feminism, which steers the novel clear of faux-woke territory.

Will this stay with us emotionally the same way The Interestings did? Maybe not. Did we devour it in three days and leave thinking about class and womanhood in the current political climate? Definitely.

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