October 17, 2004 in Features

‘Earthquakes’ hilarious, heartbreaking

• Print
• Email
• Share

The new moms in “Little Earthquakes” take prenatal yoga and Breast-Feeding 101, live by books titled “Baby Success!” and conscientiously plan their maternity leaves. They are, to put it mildly, ready.

But they quickly discover there is no preparing for the upheaval that comes with a new baby, a laid-off husband, an unfaithful spouse, an impossible mother-in-law.

Jennifer Weiner’s transcendent new novel tackles these issues and more, but don’t think for a minute that she’s written a boring tome on parenthood.” Little Earthquakes” is hilarious, heartbreaking and insightful, a satisfying leap from a writer whose voice has matured with each of her three books.

The novel introduces four women: three members of a yoga class and a mysterious figure who at first behaves like a creepy stalker.

Kelly, a bubbly event planner, finds her own carefully planned life in ruins. Ayinde, a former television reporter, learns her marriage to an NBA superstar is on shaky ground. Becky, a big-and-beautiful chef whose favorite pregnancy game is Pregnant or Just Fat?, must contend with a monstrous mother-in-law. Lia, a Hollywood actress on the run, suffers a tragic past.

All of the characters are meticulously fleshed out, their histories and insecurities explained, but Becky is the one you’d love to call a friend. She’s a lot like Weiner and the winning heroines of her previous novels, “Good in Bed” and “In Her Shoes.” They are sexy without being a size six, attractive to wonderful men and fulfilled even if they don’t lose weight.

Weiner is fantastically witty, and she channels the best part of that humor into Becky, whose married name is Rebecca Rothstein Rabinowitz (“But how will anyone know you’re Jewish?” a sarcastic friend wonders). Down to earth, nurturing and easygoing, Becky is ruffled only by her mother-in-law Mimi, who buys shirts that say “hottie” for her new granddaughter and sends a Christmas tree to their Hanukkah-observant home.

Becky’s travails are the most lighthearted – she gets all the best lines – and that’s a blessing, because the other women have to deal with serious hardship, especially Lia, running from her husband after her son’s death. At first, she is horribly unstable and sad, but as her friendship with the other women grows she comes to terms with her own loss and reminds them how lucky they are to have their own messed-up lives.

Weiner shows she can write with exquisite tenderness as well as humor: “I could have said that nothing is safe, that the surface of the world is pretty and sane, but underneath it’s all fault lines and earthquakes waiting to happen,” Lia says.

And this is the heart of the book, that we never know what might happen, that even though we pray our children will be healthy and our lives carefree, we can only hope for the strength to survive when nothing turns out as planned.

But Weiner doesn’t let this melancholy overwhelm her novel. She weaves in enough lightness to produce a multilayered story that surpasses most of the chick lit canon while managing to appeal to the nonmommy set as well.

No comments on this story so far. Add yours!