FICTION

THE PULL OF THE MOON by Elizabeth Berg (Random House: $21; 193 pp.). A woman in her 50th year runs away from home in Berg’s fourth novel. She leaves behind her daughter and her husband, Martin, although she writes to him so often (half of the book is letters to Martin; the other half, journal entries) that it becomes clear she feels more connection to him from out on the road than she did in their rather suffocating, humdrum, upper-middle-class life together. In fact, many of the letters implore Martin to see into his wife’s life, at least to make the effort to understand her and how she feels after decades of homemaking and child-rearing. Although Martin is not an impressive communicator, the narrator, Nan, loves, misses and is grateful for him.

Maybe we’ve been spoiled by “Thelma and Louise.” We expect that a couple of weeks on the road in one’s own skin will put the stake in the heart of a 1950s relationship, but it is very difficult to believe that Nan goes back to her old life. In the end, after sleeping outside in the woods, meeting all kinds of people and having wonderful, life-changing interactions with them, Nan seems to take full responsibility for her own malaise, chalking it up to the fear of getting older, never acknowledging the subcutaneous loneliness of living a life with someone who cannot communicate and doesn’t feel the need to. It gives an involved reader the willies; it rankles the way you might wish your own mother hadn’t so blithely accepted the yoke. But revelations, in novels as in life, come at their own sweet time and how one reacts to them is equally metabolic and mysterious.