As if responding to Hardwick, Meg Wolitzer's "The Wife" charts the folly of such a course and deftly surveys the motives of a woman who could plot it. Joan Ames tells her story as an apology, an explanation, and as the first book she'll sign with her own name. Like Kafka's ape in "A Report to the Academy" -- who explains how he learned to impersonate a human being and weighs the gains and losses of his transformation -- Joan unfolds the process of becoming a perfect wife.

Wolitzer's unqualified achievement is creating satire that's purged of sentimentality and that seeks to protect nothing. Not marriage, not family life, not traditional arrangements between the sexes, not any of the stations we arrive at after boarding the desire train. "The Wife" is an obituary for the ways men and women have functioned together in the past. For a woman to write, said Virginia Woolf, she had to kill "the angel in the house," meaning the part of her that grooved on martyrdom and stillness. For a woman to become known to herself now, Wolitzer says, she has to jettison her romance with being number two.

-- Laurie Stone