Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

Contemporary

Literary Fiction

Family Drama

288 Pages

"I laughed out loud and then felt vaguely implicated. Wayward is so sharp about the particular restlessness of midlife — the 3am spiral, the sudden urge to blow everything up and start over. Spiotta nails it."

Synopsis

Samantha Raymond is fifty-two, and her life is quietly unraveling. Her mother is ill. Her teenage daughter is drifting away. And she has begun waking at three or four in the morning — what she calls "the Mids" — staring into the dark and thinking about motherhood, mortality, and the state of a country that feels like it is coming apart at the seams.

Then she falls in love with a house: a beautiful, decrepit wreck in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse. She buys it on impulse and, in doing so, walks away from her suburban life and her family — not cleanly or permanently, but decisively enough that nothing will be quite the same again. What follows is a reckoning with what it means to be a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a woman of a certain age in contemporary America, in a body that is changing and a culture that doesn't quite know what to do with her.

Probing and funny and bracingly honest, Wayward is Dana Spiotta at her most assured — a novel about aging, the female body, and the strange, stubborn desire to remake yourself even when you're not sure what you're remaking yourself into.

Our Take

Wayward belongs to a small and valuable category of novels that are genuinely funny about things that are genuinely painful. Spiotta writes midlife female restlessness — the insomnia, the body, the slow erosion of a self that was always partly borrowed — with a wit and precision that makes the book feel like an act of recognition rather than observation. Samantha is not always sympathetic, but she is always real, and Spiotta never condescends to her or to the reader.

The novel's structure is loose and digressive in ways that feel intentional — mimicking the mental state of a woman who has stepped off the expected path and is not entirely sure where she is going. The Syracuse house functions less as a plot device than as an organizing metaphor: beautiful in its decay, full of potential that may or may not be realized, requiring more than anyone budgeted for. It is an extremely good metaphor, and Spiotta wears it lightly.

Readers who loved Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy for its cool, probing examination of women's inner lives, or Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation for its fragmentary, funny take on marriage and selfhood, will find Wayward a richly satisfying companion. One of the more quietly radical novels about what women want — and what they're willing to risk to find out.