Safe as Houses: On Dana Spiotta’s Wayward

Abstract

Safe as Houses: On Dana Spiotta’s Wayward Justin Taylor (bio) I can’t with this Dana Spiotta’s new novel, Wayward, takes place during the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election, which at this point might be the single most boring subject in the entire world. As soon as I realized that Trump was going to have a role in the proceedings, I seriously considered tossing my advance copy into the recycling bin. Never mind that Dana Spiotta is one of my favorite living writers, or that I waited years for this book to appear, or that I begged for this assignment to write about it. Seeing this premise instantly turned my brain to jelly and bled all the joy out of my heart. But Wayward turns out to be a complicated novel that takes big risks, some of which pay off, ahem, bigly. I’m also pleased to report that in the end, it’s barely a novel about Trump, whose name does not appear until late in the text, when it is glimpsed on an offensive novelty T-shirt at a state fair. There is an early set piece involving [End Page 742] divergent his/hers perspectives on election night (the husband, Matt, is upset but insufficiently so, at least in his wife Sam’s eyes) but it is mercifully brief and self-contained, and Spiotta gets through it without saying either candidate’s name. There’s a lot to love about this novel. As a fiction writer, there’s plenty to envy. But I’m going to lead with what the B-school boys call a top-line takeaway and admit that Wayward is an uneven and not entirely successful book. It may even be a failure, albeit a fascinating and rewarding one, like Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait or Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street. That is, she fails as only genius can. Of Dana Spiotta’s five novels — which, again, when taken together constitute one of the strongest bodies of work by any living American writer — Wayward is the fifth-best. There are two subplots that should have been cut and another that is important but MIA. Both overstuffed and undercooked, Wayward often feels unfocused, its mood the surly stupor of a late-night doomscroll. It may be that Spiotta’s intention is to ironize that mode through straight-faced mimesis (like every SNL sketch from July of 2016 to February of 2021) or it may be that the Trump era actually broke her brain. Or mine. Could be both, I suppose. You must change your life The deep subject of Wayward can be posed in the form of a question: What happens to a person when she overdoses on information in a desert of ideas? What damage is done to the heart, to the mind, and to the spirit — and can it ever be undone? It’s a novel about having your brain poisoned by the internet, by social media in particular, and how hard it is to withdraw from the digital equivalent of an opioid addiction, to knit the shreds of your life back together [End Page 743] while bearing the shame of what you’ve been reduced to, and who you hurt. Wayward is, arguably, a recovery novel, and a sophisticated, moving, blackly funny one at that. Per its jacket copy, however, Wayward is a novel about “a wife and mother reckoning with a hunger for new freedoms in midlife.” Not a bad log line, but it leaves out a lot. Wayward is a novel about internalized misogyny, historic architecture, the suburbs (they’re bad!), aesthetics as a form of eros, the crisis of having — of being — a body, the soul’s endless yearning to be known by God, what it means that modern liberalism has taste instead of ethics (it’s bad!), gentrification, menopause, police violence, stand-up comedy as a thirst trap for cringe, and Facebook (it’s bad!). You could say that Wayward is a novel about rage and despair, which are two sides of the same coin; as well as privilege and risk, which are the same side of two different coins. It...