My focus today is simply the title of this New York Times fiction review:

Happy Wife, Happy Life, and Other Maddening Notions to Live By.

Jenny Rosenstrach, New York Times (21 January 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/recipe-for-a-perfect-wife-karma-brown.html

So, what of it; it’s just a title. Sure.

But in titling in the news the copywriter’s plan is either to say something outrageous (so far from your readers’ mindset they have to read) or to land your title comfortably in the midst of their accepted ideas (this read will be a warm bath).

This title is not meant to be outrageous.

Or, it is meant to be outrageous (via the word “maddening”) to all those “backward” 21st-C conservatives who buy into ’50s ideas about marriage,

so many of [which] still somehow resonate

‒ thus affording a pleasant read indeed. (Outraging conservatives is a liberal’s delight.)

But in what world is the idea of happiness as a wife, or the prospect of

wedding, apartment, suburbs, family,

or even the idea of a “happy life” infuriating? There are very few of these we can do without. Just what is the positive attraction at the heart of this novel about all those “maddening” props of a horrid fate? The reviewer tells us that the hero character

has a lot more to teach Alice about being a wife and a woman than how to bake a good batch of cookies. The most important? Take those trappings you resent so much ‒ cooking, gardening, bearing children ‒ embrace them, then wield them like weapons.

In other words, the basic image by which to make sense of family is war.

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Ignore the inane caricature of the traditional image of “a wife and a woman” (qualification: good cookies), by comparison a minor point. As I said yesterday, this ain’t my culture.

The culture sketched by this reviewer is one in direct opposition to the traditional culture I am happy to belong to.

(I have lots to say against the ’50s, all in support of my mother, a ’50s housewife, but none of that trouble is touched on in the above. Something bigger is under lazy, reflex attack.)

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Lastly, note one more basic idea visible even in this brief review. The trouble is in the forms ‒

wedding, apartment, suburbs, family

‒ not in the people and what they do on this stage-set in which they have landed. Tear down the set!

Not my vision of trouble; not the culture I believe could deal with trouble.