Second-wave feminism seems to be having a moment.
Last year, Liberation, a play that recreates a 1970s-era consciousness raising group, opened to rave reviews on Broadway. That December, the Jewish Museum in New York mounted an exhibition of monumental nudes by the nonagenarian painter Joan Semmel that celebrate female sexual agency. And this spring Susan Kleinman is publishing her fine debut novel, All Afternoon, about an Orthodox Jewish homemaker trapped in a loveless marriage and yearning to be a writer.
When the story begins in 1978, Marilyn Weisfeld, née Kagan, is planning a small dinner party for some of her husband’s colleagues at the small college where he teaches economics, “half an hour north of Rutgers and five hundred SAT points south of Princeton.” The guest list includes Jerry’s childhood friend, Henry Goldfarb, a rakish novelist loosely based on Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, the white-hot novelists of that decade.
Marilyn had met Henry years earlier, when she was first engaged to Jerry, but was put off by his secular ways. “He no longer observed Shabbos or kept kosher, which were as much a part of who she was as being brown-eyed and sending prompt thank-you notes.”
The night of the party, Henry shows up true to form with a much younger woman, who is dressed like Diane Keaton playing the fictional Annie Hall. (Kleinman excels at such period details — the department chair’s wife wears a see-though blouse and Marilyn prepares a Julia Child recipe for Carbonnades à la Flamande.) Henry’s kindness toward one of Marilyn’s four daughters, who gets sick in the middle of the party, leaves a lingering impression on Marilyn, as does his eagerness to get her opinion about his latest novel, racily titled Pecker.
Once Marilyn starts reading, she is entranced. Far from thinking the erotic material is gratuitous, she is prompted to reflect on the absence of intimacy in her own marriage. Soon she is sneaking into Manhattan for surreptitious meetings with Henry, ostensibly to talk about his latest novel-in-progress and her attempts to restart the writing practice she abandoned soon after she married Jerry. With less time to chauffeur her kids back and forth to their private Jewish day school and prepare kosher meals from scratch, Marilyn finds herself torn between roles.
Will she stay with Jerry despite his manifest shortcomings or end up with Henry, who, she discovers, has more depth of character than she first imagined? Or, like the lead character in that quintessential ’70s sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, will she toss her hat in the air and embrace her new life as a single, working woman?
Kleinman has a fine sense of pacing and a plot that will hold readers in suspense. One must wait almost until the very end to discover what the enigmatic, alluring title, All Afternoon, refers to. Could it be languorous days in Henry’s Upper West Side apartment or something else entirely that will keep Marilyn in River Ridge doing a Modern Orthodox version of women’s lib?
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her memoir and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and she has read her stories on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
