Jay Ponteri’s memoir Wedlocked reviewed in BookSlut
Bookslut posts not only a review of Jay Ponteri’s Wedlocked, but a great discussion about marriage in books.
Women’s voices have long figured prominently in the publishing sub-category of marriage memoirs, so for the sake of fairness and balance, it was nice to find one written by a man.
Unlike marriage chronicles written in recent decades, Jay Ponteri’s Wedlocked does not pander to a culture more enamored with life after marriage than the reasons why marriage is so hard, and how it can—if it can—actually work. But it does share their premise: The choice of whom to marry is an unbelievably big decision. At twenty, twenty-five, men and women are, depending on how they were brought up, pressured to decide for the rest of their life, at a time when they are bereft of reason. They need to be impartial about the object of their love, when love prejudices them in their lover’s favor. Unfortunately, such is the cockeyed nature of things that many marrying people get into this predicament. And it usually ends the same way…
Looking back over the history of books about marriage, of the few written by men, almost none are written from the perspective, and in the voice of, their authors. Tolstoy and Balzac embed their own thoughts in the perspectives of fictional male heroes. “Adolphe” is one such avatar in Balzac’s Petty Troubles of Married Life, who heads off the rest of the book’s chapters, allowing Balzac to avoid self-identification by writing in the second person. Rather than “I” experienced this, “‘You’ (like Adolphe) can expect to experience this, as a married man.” Updike, too, has the chance to divide his perspectives among ten married pairs in Couples. Tolstoy speaks his own mind through the remarks of everyone from Count Vronsky to Posdnicheff.
Few men up until now has embraced marital candor in a first-person narrative—to this extent—with the exception of August Strindberg in The Confession of a Fool. That book gave such an embarrassingly honest record of a first marriage, the author no longer feared death.
Plumbing the depths of his soul, Ponteri leaves nothing out. It’s like he’s trying to make a case for all married men everywhere, for why they should stop feeling bad, isolated, like failures. He is philosophical about it (“Digging for what I do not know—like I do not know how two people can sustain a marriage over a lifetime, or how and why we give up erotic love for companionship, or why, just as I’ve created something, I wish to tear it apart”) and unapologetically honest (“I often imagine my wife’s death”), as if to ask the reader, “Don’t you?”
To read the entire review, go to Bookslut.