The married Mina in “Lightning Field” carries on affairs with two other men. In “Stone Arabia,” a rock musician writes an autobiography envisioning the career he wished he had. Some are very literally on the run - “Eat the Document” features radical activists in hiding - while others are running from themselves, if only in their imaginations or through easy, available transgression. Spiotta has always written about fugitives of one kind or another. She joins Facebook groups like “Hardcore Hags, Harridans and Harpies” - “a resistance group for women over 50.”ĭana Spiotta, whose new novel is “Wayward.” Credit. Her mind seethes with what she calls her “midlife misogyny” - watching other women capitulate or, worse, try to outpace age on their yoga mats, with their ash-blond balayage highlights. Your choices are invisibility or disdain. That sound I hear is the disabused laughter of Sam Raymond, the heroine of Dana Spiotta’s furious and addictive new novel, “Wayward.”Ĭloying, consoling banalities, she might say. “Flowering,” as she called it, was Colette’s lifelong subject, what she considered the “essential drama.” Curious, perhaps, given that she also happened to write one of the great novels of menopause - “Break of Day.” Why limit “flowering” to adolescence, to initiation? Can’t other transitions - menopause, for example, with its own startling varieties of knowledge and transformation - be embraced as a kind of second bloom, an unfurling of a new self?

“Elle connaît la vie,” Colette noted in a letter: “She knows life.” For Colette, whose signature theme was romantic awakening, even the loss of a cat’s virginity counted as a momentous rite of passage.

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