Sunday, March 14, 2010

By Reviewed by Nancy Klingener

"Committed"

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Viking, $26.95

For years I avoided reading "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was a bestselling memoir, a species of which I am naturally suspicious. I avoided it even more strenuously after reading a description of its opening -- Gilbert in her upscale suburban home, crying her eyes out because she was miserable in her marriage. Puh-leeze.

But the damned thing just keeps getting more popular; as of this writing, it is number 6 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list, its home for the last 156 weeks.

People whose literary judgment I respect told me it was good -- no, that it was great. When we started considering writers for the upcoming Literary Seminar about food, 80 percent of the people we talked to told us we had to get Gilbert.

So at some point last year I read "Eat, Pray, Love." And damned if I didn't like it. A lot. Despite the opening scene in an upscale suburban home, Gilbert was not a pampered whiner whose marriage just couldn't fulfill her every whim. She was a hardworking and successful freelance writer, a type I have always admired. (Try it sometime; it's not so easy.) She was not self-absorbed, although perhaps at times a little too self-aware. But always in a very funny, self-deprecating way. And she can write.

As almost everyone must know by now, the book chronicles Gilbert's year of self-discovery as she tried to find her way out of a bad divorce and an extremely bad bout of depression during three prolonged sojourns abroad in, successively, Italy (eat), India (pray) and Indonesia (love).

And she did find love at last, with an older man who was so determinedly different from her ex-husband, from her whole failed romantic life, that it was truly a new start, at least in the realm of love.

Gilbert's new book, "Committed," is about what happened next.

It's a memoir but not in the same style as "Eat, Pray, Love." We all know how this one's going to end, especially since the subtitle is "A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage." It's got a hefty dose of social analysis, of marriage and its place in modern Western, life, but without being one of those polemics of the Mommy Wars type, which is refreshing.

Gilbert writes that she and her new beau, whom she calls Felipe in the last book and in this one, had no intention of getting married. It wasn't that they weren't deeply committed -- they made complex global travel arrangements to be together, even exchanged rings and vows in a Knoxville, Tenn., hotel room.

But they had both been through traumatic divorces and marriage seemed ... unnecessary. One of the most convincing arguments she makes is "simple embarrassment. How very awkward to stand in front of one's family and friends (many of whom had been guests at one's first wedding) and swear solemn vows for life all over again. Hadn't they all seen this film already? One's credibility does begin to tarnish after too much of this sort of thing."

Unfortunately for independent-minded Gilbert and Felipe, the Department of Homeland Security has a different take on the matter. After returning to the U.S. together via Dallas -- their solution to the immigration issue was for Felipe to leave the country every three months) -- he is detained, then deported to his official country of residency, Australia. If they want to be together in America, they are told, they must marry.

That settled it. Except that, as anyone who has ever dealt with immigration permissions knows, it takes a while. So Gilbert and her now-fiancé go to live where they can be together and it's cheap (this was before "Eat, Pray, Love" became a surprise best-seller). They go to East Asia.

There, Gilbert spends her time investigating marriage by reading voluminous sociological reports and by interviewing Hmong grandmothers. It's all illuminating, especially when Gilbert goes back in history (Western history) and explains how this idea of lifelong monogamous marriage is actually a recent construct, while allowing that seemingly modern ideas like separation, divorce and even gay marriage have ancient precedents.

In the end, Reader, she marries him. To no one's surprise except perhaps her own, she gets back on the marriage train after having sworn off it so vehemently (she still sounds a bit bitter about her ex-husband; reports say he's now writing his own memoir).

We knew she would do so.

And we wish her well.

Nancy Klingener is a library assistant at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West and blogs at boneislandbooks.blogspot.com.