Discoveries

The Wife

A Novel

Meg Wolitzer

Scribner: 224 pp., $23

Meg Wolitzer has ripened into a chanteuse of a writer, a Dietrich of fiction; her smoky humor, her languid look at life, her breathless sentences are all let loose a little more than usual in “The Wife.”

Joan is 64, married to a literary lion, Joe Castleman, one of the big men in the world who “derived much of his style from ‘The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.’ ” They are on their way to Helsinki where he will receive the prestigious Helsinki Prize, $525,000, awarded to a writer, one step down from the Nobel. This is as far as Joan will climb with him, though he does not yet know it. While their three children have grown in various states of contortion around his ego and their marriage, she is the real writer in the marriage, and she has borne him all the way: his affairs, successes, setbacks with a grace that is the envy of their friends and acquaintances. But now she’s done. Not mad, just ready to have her own life.

It has by no means been a life of quiet suffering. It was a life she chose as a young student at Smith College, a promising writer in her own right, who fell in love with her professor, Castleman, and seduced him knowingly, so that he was eventually forced to leave his wife and baby daughter. She became the “alpha wife” at literary conferences and parties, and she enjoys it with a kind of Mrs. Ramsey-like artfulness.

Various literary women make an impression on her and haunt her decisions: “Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers

Wolitzer’s world is John Updike’s world, but her writing is at once grittier and bigger. It’s hard to tell how old she is because she writes with so little bitterness. I hope that “The Wife” might appeal to both men and women. It is as much about the male psyche as it is about the woman’s.

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Virgins of Venice

Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent

Mary Laven

Viking: 304 pp., $24.95

“Virgins of Venice” opens in 1609 in Venice. It describes a city in which ghettos were popular ways of keeping blood and social relations “pure.” Women had three career options: nun, wife or whore. Convents were places where girls from noble families who did not face a high possibility of marriage (a limp; homeliness; too many daughters and too little money for a sufficient dowry) were “dumped,” as Mary Laven explains. Not “called” but “dumped.”

For many of the young Venetians, raised amid low-cut finery, not exactly delighted to be “married to Jesus,” this was a bit of a problem. As the government of Venice became increasingly insecure in the world and at odds with the Vatican (the Church of Venice often had its hands slapped for general immorality), its fear over what went on in these convents increased along with its attempts to control them. Nuns were prohibited from leaving the convents or fraternizing with outsiders. Sex “with a bride of Christ” was punishable by death (“Let his head be cut off so that it is separated from the body, and so that death ensues,” Laven quotes a piece of legislation from 1605).

Arranging illicit rendezvous, Laven writes, became a kind of sport among noblemen. The most entertaining parts of this book -- though I am not sure this is exactly what Laven intended -- are the accounts of escapes and trysts and storage rooms where lovers stayed for 10 days of intense copulation. Laven has, in parts, struck a devil’s bargain between scholarship and entertainment. Passages from a book written by a young woman in the 17th century called “A Nun’s Hell” (a text the true devotee can look forward to) are cited.

Many of these convents still exist in Venice. The nuns are no longer prisoners but work in the community in schools and hospitals. Architectural details in the convents, like barred windows and retaining walls, serve as constant reminders of a less happy time.