THE TEN YEAR NAP

Meg Wolitzer has established herself, intentionally or not, as the fiction laureate of feminist social politics with her previous two novels: The Wife, the story of a secret literary collaboration between an award-winning, philandering writer and his brilliant wife, and The Position, which reveals the lasting impact of the sexual revolution on the four children of a pair of cultural provocateurs. Thus, The Ten-Year Nap completes a trilogy of sorts, introducing four New York women who've opted out of their impressive careers to choose full-time motherhood and are finding themselves locked into what is now a familiar dilemma: how to be an ambidextrous Superwoman while negotiating a postnatal identity crisis. Lest readers think an F-word novel -- by which I mean "feminist" -- could only be humorless, unappealing, passé, or heavily weighed down with an agenda of some kind, they will be pleasantly disappointed by Wolitzer's droll, urbane wit and her spot-on depictions of women's lives amid the demanding, competitive, and exhilarating metropolis, as she dispels the media-perpetuated myth of the "post-feminist" era.