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That ’70s book: THE POSITION, by Meg Wolitzer

That ’70s book
Newsday, NY

THE POSITION, by Meg Wolitzer. Scribner, 307 pp., $24.
reviewed by BY HELLER McALPIN
Heller McAlpin is a writer in New York.

Meg Wolitzer is that all too rare joy, a writer who gets better and better with each succeeding book. Beginning with her last novel, "The Wife" (2003), Wolitzer has been writing with a new boldness; she's willing to tackle bigger issues and isn't afraid to infringe on the territories of Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody, including the domestic fallout from 1970s suburbia. "The Position," her seventh novel, published coincidentally on the heels of both a novel and a movie about the effects of Alfred Kinsey's open attitude toward sex on his inner circle, examines the role of sexuality in family dynamics.

As a rule, children find the mere thought of their parents' sex lives repugnant. Pity the four Mellow offspring, then, whose parents publish a "Joy of Sex"-style manual called "Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment." The year is 1975, the place a Long Island suburb. The book, which features illustrations of the amorous authors posed in the positions they discuss - including an untenable contortion of their own invention that they hilariously dub "Electric Forgiveness" - is a runaway bestseller. The experience for the four children, ages 6 to 15, is "so incontestably mortifying that it threatened to stunt them forever," Wolitzer writes.

Wolitzer's focus is the aftereffects of that indecent exposure. She picks up the Mellows' story 28 years later, when a 30th anniversary edition looms. She fleshes out each of the six family members' individual sagas - with the accent on "flesh." With aplomb, Wolitzer considers physical intimacy in myriad forms: married, straight, gay, lesbian, teen.

Not surprisingly, of the four children, only one becomes a parent: the eldest, Holly, who runs away as a teenager, loses herself in drugs and barely looks back, even after finding salvation with a ponytailed doctor.

Michael, the second child, is brilliant but chronically depressed. More engaging is his brother, Dashiell, a gay Log Cabin Republican speechwriter. He and his wonderful partner, Tom, are happy until Dashiell is diagnosed with cancer. The running joke here is that Dashiell's "dreadful politics" are far more objectionable to his liberal family than his homosexuality, which is a nonissue - such a nonissue that his parents, to his offense, barely acknowledge gay sex in their book. rest of this review here: That ’70s book or order the book here.

posted by Tom Jackson @ Sunday, March 13, 2005