Love actually

It’s not that these writers are outright sexist but that their portrayals of women — daughters, sisters, lovers, wives — are less than clear-eyed, that at the deepest root these characters exist not as they really are but as these male writers wish they were.

Thankfully, a good number of excellent novelists have been working in the interim to set the romantic record straight, most recently Drew Perry in his novel “This Is Just Exactly Like You.’’ At the conclusion of this precision portrait of men, women, marriage, parenthood, and love, one is certain not just to find their mouth ash-less, but to have gotten a sumptuous taste of how we live now.

Set in and around Perry’s stomping ground of Greensboro, N.C., the novel centers on thirty-something Jack Lang. His wife, Beth, has not only moved out but in with his best friend, Canavan, leaving Jack to tend to their 6-year-old, autistic son, Hendrick. In the vein of Carver et al, Jack is tenderhearted and confused, struggling to make sense of how his life has come apart. He runs a garden-supply company, Patriot Mulch & Tree, and has had the bad sense to buy the house across the street from his own, believing he can renovate it and turn a fast profit.

Problem is, he’s having a hard enough time keeping his own house in one piece. This, among not a few other of Jack’s unrealistic projects and aspirations, caused Beth to hightail it.

From this point forward we witness Jack trying and failing to get a handle on his own bewilderment. At first blush it’s tempting to characterize this vantage as stereotypically male, and yet the women in this novel wear their own varieties of alienation and befuddlement, albeit in shades of what an earlier generation would have designated classically male. It’s Jack’s wife who holds down the stressful (and more serious) job, she who leaves and first commits adultery, she who pounds on her husband’s face. Meanwhile, their efforts to communicate correspond, in the words of Gornick, with “the struggle so many women and so many men are waging now to make sense of themselves as they actually are.’’