[...] When Emma Bovary was loosening her stays with a man other than her husband, or Anna Karenina running away from hers, or Newbold Archer agonizing over whether to leave New York with Ellen Olenska, people were indeed risking all for love. Bourgeois respectability had the power to make of these characters social pariahs. Strength would be needed to sustain exile. Out of such risk taking might come the force of suffering that brings clarity and insight. Today, there are no penalties to pay, no world of respectability to be excommunicated from. Bourgeois society as such is over. If the wife in The Age of Grief walks away from her marriage, she'll set up housekeeping on the other side of town with a man named Jerry instead of one named Dave, in ten minutes make a social life the equivalent of the one her first marriage had provided her, and in two years she and her new husband will find themselves at a dinner party that includes the ex-husband and his new wife: everyone chatting amiably. Two years after that, one morning in the kitchen or one night in the bedroom, she'll slip and call Jerry Dave, and they will both laugh.

For this character to be hungering for erotic passion at a crucial moment when she's up against all that she has, and has not, done with her life struck me as implausible. She had to know better, I thought. On the other hand, if blissing-out was what the wife was up to, then the story could be made large only if the author of her being called her on it. But Jane Smiley wasn't calling her on it. She was using the illicit passion of the wife straight -- as though she expected me, the reader, to accept erotic longing at face value as an urgency compelling enough to bring into relief the shocking ordinariness of these stricken lives. But I did not accept it. I could not. I know too much about love. We all know too much. I could not accept as true that a love affair would bring the wife (and therefore me) to feel deeply the consequence of her original insufficient intentions. And that is why an otherwise excellent novella struck me as a small good thing. Embedded as it was in a convention, not a truth, the conceit itself prevented the writer from asking the questions necessary to deepen thought and action.