Review: 'Wayward,' by Dana Spiotta

When Sam, a 53-year-old woman in Syracuse, N.Y., sees a dilapidated Arts and Crafts house in a neighborhood that's seen better days, she falls in love.

An "architectural amateur" who abandoned her professional dreams to get married and have a child (in a self-described "retro move"), Sam sees the cottage as an opportunity to change her life. She impulsively buys the house, and tells her husband, Matt, she's leaving him, which crushes both him and their 16-year-old daughter, Ally.

That's the setup for Dana Spiotta's breathtaking new novel, "Wayward," a book that masterfully explores the pressures of being a woman in a society that's hostile to the very fact that you exist, and that refuses to tolerate any attempt to step outside its arbitrary boundaries.

While Sam's dissatisfaction with her life didn't start with the 2016 election — the results of which horrified her — it did exacerbate it. Her husband treated the results like a loss by his favorite baseball team, and Sam realized "that the world had moved against her more than it had moved against Matt."

So she seeks out friends in the resistance movement, spending her nights in her new house, aware that "she was an outsider, an interloper, a fake member of this community. Her comfort amid so much discomfort was a form of affront."

She texts her daughter every night; Ally, furious with her mother, whom she's long considered nosy and overbearing, never responds.

Ally, meanwhile, has started having a secret sexual relationship with Joe, a 29-year-old man. "She knew what she was doing was dangerous, but it was also the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. … She felt alive to her future adult self."

She refuses to consider their clandestine encounters as statutory rape, noting that the word "rape" comes from a Latin term meaning to seize property: "She was not anyone's property, and Joe was not taking anything from her but, rather, giving her everything."

Spiotta follows both mother and daughter as Sam seeks to reinvent herself and Ally goes on a quest to define herself for the first time. The characters are stubbornly defiant, and Spiotta does a wonderful job depicting them in their twin rebellions: Sam, who "liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else," and Ally, who discovers that she's "careful, and quite good, it turned out, at keeping secrets."

Spiotta cleverly tackles several subjects in her novel, among them childhood, motherhood and misogyny. "Wayward" is a strikingly intelligent book, sometimes funny, sometimes painful: In one scene, Sam delivers a stand-up comedy performance devoid of jokes, enduring misogynistic slurs from an audience hostile, it seems, to women doing literally anything.

It's a brilliant novel with love — never a simple subject — at its core. As Sam reminds us, reflecting on her own mother reassuring her as a child: "Those moments … that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay."

Michael Schaub is a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Texas.

Wayward
By: Dana Spiotta.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $27.