Author Elizabeth Gilbert
(2 of 3)
Gilbert is a highly conversational writer--a blessing if you are in the memoir business. Four years after its publication, Eat, Pray, Love remains on the New York Times best-seller list, giving its author a chance, with the likely sales of this new book, to become the Malcolm Gladwell of soul-searching. Gilbert left her loyalists believing that a year of spiritual questing would end with peace, love and the address of the best pizzeria in Naples. There could be no doubt that her readers wanted more. She and Felipe had gone off into the sunset; could she now describe the rosy glow?
But Committed--and to a certain extent, Powell's Cleaving--demonstrates the curse of the conversational writer. I confess to having found EPL tedious at times and to struggling with the fortuitous arrival of true love at the end of Gilbert's year of self-discovery. (In Committed, she pokes fun at herself, quoting her sister Catherine's response to her gushy e-mails from Bali: "Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too ... but then there was all that traffic.") There was no denying, however, that she was a vibrant woman on a cool adventure, with stories to tell. The pressure to return to that fertile ground must have been enormous. Just as she was sentenced to marrying, she was sentenced to sequel writing.
Committed gives us a woman trapped in a command performance she's too smart not to be dubious about. She seems self-conscious about the need to remain everyone's best friend, littering her prose with chirpy asides ("Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no!") and cutesy interjections ("Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz"). Then there are the apologies for anything that might offend. Her eloquent defense of gay marriage, for instance, is diminished by this chatty advisory: "You see where I'm heading with this, right? Or rather, you see where history is heading with this? What I mean to say is, you won't be surprised, will you, if I now take a few minutes to discuss the subject of same-sex marriage?"
Gilbert also repeats, incessantly, information she's already conveyed, whether it be the vastness of the belly of a pregnant woman she's dining with or the details of a coat--wine-colored, with a fur collar--once owned by her grandmother. (We hear about its beauty four times in three pages.) There are useful insights into the dilemma of modern marriage here, but the overall effect of the heavily padded Committed is like that of being called, over and over, by a friend who wants to talk your ear off about her impending nuptials. Only instead of debating the floral arrangements, she's wondering, Should I really be taking the leap? Halfway through Committed, I wanted to put the phone down and walk away, leaving Gilbert to figure it out on her own.
How to Butcher a Marriage