I know I’m late on the bandwagon on this one, since Angry Housewives was published in 2003 (and, if you ask me, probably had something to do with inspiring Desperate Housewives). I had Angry Housewives sitting around the house for at least a year until I finally pulled it from the to-be-read pile. And then found myself reading half the night as my husband peacefully slept along beside me. This is a book that reminded me a lot of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. The author sets up a group of female friends (here, a book club), and then watches them change and grow in relation to each other and American culture over forty years.

I’m going to be honest here and say that this novel didn’t (for me) achieve the level of pure enjoyment of The Group. I think one of the reasons is that it was so interesting to read about The Group going through the fifties and the sixties. I lived through the seventies and the eighties, so when the Angry Housewives started wearing shoulder pads the whole cultural aspect of the book ceased to be as riveting. I did love the earlier centuries. The way they all smoked, even while pregnant — it was kind of fascinating, like watching a train wreck about the window of a cab. And when someone’s 1960’s mother-in-law is all worried about boys who don’t dress like boys, and girls who don’t dress like girls: well, that had a certain fascination too. One character had a paranormal streak and is able to sense when terrible things are about to happen; that was fun to read about in a book that was otherwise so tied to the mundane, and spent a lot of time celebrating the glory of butterscotch pie (huh?).

But over all, I’d say that too many things happened that I absolutely knew were going to happen. Of course one woman had a gay son, and one woman adopted a biracial child, and naturally a couple of them got divorced. Books about groups of women always run the danger of steering haphazardly into being a survey of the decades involved. So one of the women is a feminist, and one of them is a homophobe (mildly speaking) and one of them is a slut… all the better to see their reflection in America in the 60s, 70, 80s, etc.

Mind you: I enjoyed reading the cultural reflection part. But what kept me reading, page after page, was the story of one woman who’s an abused housewife. I have no idea why I find this particular storyline so riveting. I could never write a novel about it myself; I can’t stand the sorrow and the rage it raises in me. I wanted to go out and kill this woman’s husband myself. I just realized, thinking about the book, that I would love to shelve this part as a cultural reflection of the 70s and 80s: “oh, how sad that was, back when women concealed the fact that their husbands were beating them up.” And then I jolted back awake and remember that it’s happening all the time now, and then unlike biracial children, or gay sons, nothing much seems to have happened along the lines of stopping that sort of abuse.

Let’s talk about this book in the Book Club (if you’ve read it), but also about other books like it–who’s read a book or two that focuses on a group of women? There’s so many of them these days. It seems as if every other Beach Book is about a group of women. What do you think the standard parts are? The gay son, the adopted child, the cancer… what else? The Book Club will begin on Monday, March 17 — Please join us!

And, thinking ahead, next month the Book Club will read Food and Loathing: a Life Measured out by Calories, by Betsy Lerner. This is a terrific book about women and food and battling perceptions, even if you don’t get a chance to read it (but you’ll love it if you do), we can all talk about food and loathing!