TODAY A WOMAN WENT MAD IN THE SUPERMARKET

Thirteen timeless stories of what goes on between men and women, grounded in an optimism that is no stranger to sorrow.

Ninety-one-year-old Wolitzer, author of five novels and mother of Meg, collects for the first time her stories from the 1960s and '70s, many first published in Esquire, Ms., and elsewhere, and adds a brand new one from 2020. A foreword by Elizabeth Strout alerts us to the particular joys of Wolitzer's prose style and storytelling—how she "leaves enough spaces between the lines" for us to "enter the story with our own experiences and therefore make it our own." After the crystalline title story zips us straight back to the mad housewife era and a second introduces the centrality of female desire in Wolitzer's work, there's a run of seven narrated by Paulette, or Paulie as her husband, Howard, calls her. Full of the pleasures of intimacy, these are unusually happy stories about a complicated marriage. No matter that it begins with an unplanned pregnancy; weathers infidelity, an extended visit from Howard's first wife, and the appearance of a sex maniac in the building ("about time," thinks Paulie); and tackles her insomnia and his depression (usually responsive to a day spent driving around to visit model homes). "Why am I so happy?" wonders Paulie. "I know the same bad things Howard knows." Spoiled as we are by the tonic power of Paulie's worldview, it's an adjustment to embrace three grimmer stories that follow. But wait—in an amazing grand finale, Wolitzer brings Paulie and Howard back a half-century later, reckoning with the usual dirty tricks of old age. "Howard, who had once been so gorgeous," is now "grizzled and paunchy and gray," but Paulie is still Paulie: Where she used to check her husband's side of the bed upon waking for "a promising rise in the bedclothes," she now rejoices in the simple evidence of breath. It seemed like the world “would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn't." And along comes the novel coronavirus to do its worst.

Completing the trajectory of her early triumphs with a pandemic masterpiece, Wolitzer takes our breath away.