Committed

November 23, 2009

Reviewed by
Amy Sohn
How does an author follow up a smash international bestseller that has catapulted her from obscurity into fame and riches she never dreamed of? Very carefully.
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
, Elizabeth Gilbert's first book since the multimillion-selling Eat, Pray, Love
, was written so carefully that it's actually her second attempt (she scrapped the first one after she decided the voice was wrong). The good news is her voice is clear and winning. The bad news is the structure doesn't work. Part history, part travelogue, Committed
often makes for a jumpy read. Still, Gilbert remains the spirited storyteller she was in EPL
, and her central question is a good one—how can a divorce-scarred feminist make a case for marriage?
EPL
ended in Bali with Gilbert falling in love with Felipe, a hot, older Brazilian divorcé. Book clubs across the country passionately debated her message: “Is Gilbert saying I need a man to be happy?”; “What if I go to Bali and don't meet the love of my life?”; and “How did a woman who didn't want children land the only Latino hottie with a vasectomy in all of Indonesia?”
In the year following their meeting, Felipe and Gilbert cobbled together a long-distance relationship; he would stay with her in the U.S. for 90-day jaunts, and the rest of the time they'd live apart or travel the world. One day in the spring of 2006, they returned to the Dallas Airport and Felipe was detained at the border. A customs agent said he could not enter the country again unless he married Gilbert.
Gilbert spent the next year in exile with Felipe—straining the relationship—and did a lot of reading about marriage. In jaunty, ever-curious prose she tells us that today's Hmong women in Vietnam don't expect their husbands to be their best friends; that in modern Iran young couples can marry for a day; and that early Christians were actually against marriage, seeing it as antireligious.
It's all fascinating stuff, but ultimately Gilbert is more interested in the history of divorce than marriage. The reader can feel both her excitement when she tells us that in medieval Germany there were two kinds of marriages, one more casual than the other, and her rage when she recounts the ill effects of the Church on divorce as it “turned marriage into a life sentence.”
For all of its academic ambition, the juiciest bits of Committed
are the personal ones, when she tells us stories about her family. There's a great scene involving the way her grandfather scattered her grandmother's ashes, and a painfully funny story of a fight Gilbert and Felipe had on a 12-hour bus ride in Laos.
The bus is bumpy, the travelers exhausted, and both feel the frustration of not being able to make a home together. They bicker, and she tries and fails at a couples-therapy technique, and a “heated silence went on for a long time.” Later in the story, when she is hemming and hawing about the Meaning of It All, he says, “When are you going to understand? As soon as we secure this bloody visa and get ourselves safely married back in America, we can do whatever the hell we want.” I am happy for Gilbert that she did a lot of research before tying the knot again, but she already did the most important thing a gun-shy bride can do: choose the right mate.
Amy Sohn is the author of the novel
Prospect Park West.

October 15, 2009
In the follow up to Eat, Pray, Love (2006), Gilbert examines her reluctant marriage to Felipe, the Brazilian businessman she met at the end of her post-divorce travels, and considers her doubts about the institution of marriage.

After the narrative of her previous book ended, Gilbert and her beau moved to the United States, promised never to get married and set about building a life together. Immigration law soon intervened, however, when Felipe was denied entry to the country. The only solution was marriage, and the memoir recounts how the couple was"sentenced to marry by the Homeland Security Department." Both Gilbert and Felipe, however, had deep reservations about matrimony—some philosophical, some personal. The author narrates the months spent traveling abroad while waiting for the government to process the requisite paperwork, as well as Gilbert's quest to interview people from different cultures regarding marriage. She also delves into contemporary research on matrimony, divorce and happiness. In Southeast Asia, Hmong women don't have the same expectations about emotional fulfillment in marriage."Perhaps I was asking too much of love," writes Gilbert. Her mother, we learn, loved raising children but profoundly regretted the loss of her career:"If I dwell on that too much, honest to God, I become so enraged, I can't even see straight." Gilbert provides a variety of grim statistics about marriage, her thoughts on gay marriage and a"rant" on gender inequity and social-conservative constructions of the institution. Presented in the author's easy-going, conversational style, the material is intriguing and often insightful. However, readers may wonder if Gilbert has actually made her peace with marriage, despite the nuptials at the end."Forgive me then, if, at the end of my story," she writes,"I seem to be grasping at straws in order to reach comforting conclusions about matrimony."

A vaguely depressing account of how intimate relationships are complicated by marriage, divorce and expectations about both. Given Gilbert's popularity and the state of marriage in America, however, the book is likely to become a bestseller.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2009
Sure it garnered starred reviews, but who knew that Gilberts memoir about her quest for psychic healing, Eat, Pray, Love (2006), would become what she describes as a megajumbo international best-seller? Or that she would be in demand as a relationship guru? Or that her relationship with Felipe, the Brazilian businessman she fell in love with in Bali, would get so complicated? An Australian citizen, Felipe was living with Gilbert in the U.S. on a visa-to-visa basis until Homeland Security denied him reentry. As post-traumatic-divorce syndrome sufferers, they swore never to remarry, but marry they must if they want to be together in the States. This effort involves a humongous amount of red tape and time, so they set off on a rambling trip across Southeast Asia, and Gilbert tries to banish her fears by embarking on a crash course in the history, practice, and meaning of marriage. Her far-roaming inquiry, much of it focused on the paradoxes in womens lives, is presumptuous and trite one moment (her observations about women in Asia are cringe-inducing) and incisive and funny the next (her portraits of her grandmother and mother are sensitive and scintillating). Ultimately, she tells an irresistibly romantic tale spiked with unusual and resonant insights into love and marriage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

February 22, 2010
Gilbert's sequel to the megabestselling Eat, Pray, Love
is a serious, sincere, yet ultimately tedious slog of a listen. Debating whether or not to marry her boyfriend, the author embarks on a one-year study of marriage's evolution, cultural variations, pitfalls, and pleasures. It's earnest and heartfelt, but there's no story. Gilbert's encapsulations of her research cannot sustain the reader's interest, and her forays into amateur anthropology in Southeast Asia are crude and uncharitable: she vacillates between tropes of the happy savage and crowing that the Hmong women she interviews will never know her level of education, health, and agency. But these considerable flaws belong to the material alone; Gilbert's reading is unimpeachable. Her voice is low, warm, slightly hoarse; her attitude is confiding and self-deprecating, and her charm does much in making the book's less palatable sections go down easily. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 23).