Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage: Committed

I would like to take the event of my first post on Okra and Glue to review a possibly contentious book, given the current climate of intense conversation about marriage in our country. The book is Committed by acclaimed author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed is a follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love in the sense that it follows Gilbert's life in the year or two after the end of the story in Eat, Pray, Love. However, where Eat, Pray, Love was a primer on Gilbert's spiritual journey, cut up into bite-sized mini-chapters that kept you reading out of pure hunger for the next little spiritual insight, Committed is focused entirely on Gilbert's self-conscious mistrust and distaste for the institution of marriage. And while this reviewer is not prepared or interested in comparing the merits of Eat, Pray, Love to those of Committed, I will just go ahead and put out there that there are only two kinds of people who will pick up Committed: 1. Those who really enjoy Gilbert's first book and think she has more to give; 2. Those who are contemplating marriage and think this book will help them understand it better.

I fall firmly into the first category. I liked Eat, Pray, Love (didn't put it down, practically) and I thought Gilbert might be strong enough of a writer to merit another excellent book. I wasn't entirely wrong. It's not a terrible book. There are 8 really long chapters and it's a decent mix between personal/memoir narrative and her thoughts/research on marriage. It drags, I won't lie, but the dragging isn't entirely out of place, given the spot she and her fiance are in.

Here's the back story. In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert goes on this year long spiritual pilgrimage because her marriage has deteriorated and her new ex-husband has gotten pretty much every cent she had to her name (mostly because she suddenly got the idea that she didn't want to be married to him anymore, and told him so, i.e. there was no REAL reason for the divorce). She managed to con someone into giving her a book deal and the funds up front to do the traveling which would give her the material for the book. She goes to Italy, eats a lot, goes to India, prays a lot, and end up in Bali, and much to her chagrin, falls in LOVE. The man she falls in love with is an Australian born Brazilian, 17 years her senior, who lives in Bali because after his divorce there just wasn't any place for him at home anymore. She calls him Philipe. How charming.

At the end of the book they are together. We all roll our eyes and get on with our lives. However, when Committed shows up, we find out that there is trouble in Paradise. Or rather trouble in the U.S. has caused Philipe to be deported, which means he can only get back and live a normal life with his lover in the States if he marries her. Well, since Philipe has no way to be near her in the U.S., Gilbert consigns herself to traveling the world with him while they wait for various papers to be processed so he could be at the very least eligible for marriage in the States. The problem (because we all know there has to be a problem) is that these two do NOT want to get married. They both hated getting divorced, and don't want to do it again. But they have to, but it's against their vows to one another... Blah, blah, blah...

At this point, I'm thinking, seriously? It's such a hardship that the worst thing which could possibly happen to you is marriage, and all the legal/social benefits that come with it? Really, Gilbert, Really?! Not everyone has someone kicking around to marry if they don't want to get kicked out of the United States for real. It's nice that it's working out for you, how about you give the institution of marriage, as a legal status, some love.

The book is kind of whiny. She doesn't want to, but she has to. Oh noes. Feel bad for her while she teaches you everything you ever didn't want to know about marriage. But really, critically, I think the biggest fault of this book is the SUPER LONG CHAPTERS. I'm the sort of reader that if you don't give me natural breaks in the reading, all the words start to blur together and then I start flipping forward to see where the section or chapter ends. At that point if it's too far, I will likely just put the damn thing down and go to bed. If it's close, I'll be like, OK, I'm going to finish this section. With Committed, there was a lot of putting the damn thing down. It was the anti-thesis of Eat, Pray, Love in this way. And so I hated that about it.

But I'm in the first group of people who picked up this book. If you belong to the second, it is very likely that you will enjoy her insight into marriage, and gain perspective from the stories she tells about marriage in different cultures and how they all compare. She is really quite sensitive to the issue of same sex marriage, and while I find her whole outlook a little pretentious and whiny, she is a good writer and I did finish the book. **pats self on back**

So, people looking marriage in the eye might find this book a useful meditation in preparation for that rite of commitment. But if you were a former Gilbert fan, let me just say, there will be very little for you to eat, pray with, or love about this most recent offering of hers.

Ta!