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  • New Zealand Listener

    Nowhere man

    Jun 05, 2022 4 minutes

    THE MEN, by Sandra Newman (Granta, $32.99)

    The blurb of The Men asks: “What if the price of a better world was losing the person you love?” Early on, the narrator, Jane, imagines an alternative present in which she is single. Is this an indication of how we might read the novel?

    There is a kind of a joke reading of the novel where everything that happens is a reflection of Jane’s ambivalence about being a stay-at-home mother. I’m always trying to shoehorn more ideas into my novels, and here it’s about mundane personal discontents and how hard it can be to tell if they really are normal.

    Is it normal that being a stay-at-home mother is

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