Book of the week: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

(Viking, 286 pages, $26.95)

If Elizabeth Gilbert weren’t real, she could be “a heroine from Ibsen,” said Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. In 2006, the then-little-known writer published a memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, in which she depicted her first marriage as a prison. Because Gilbert was a 21st-century heroine, though, she escaped instead of going mad, then chased personal bliss during an adventurous year in Italy, India, and Indonesia. Her new book turns the page: More than anything, it is “an unfurling of Gilbert’s profound anxiety” about finding herself on the verge of a second marriage, this time to a man she loves who needs a green card. Because Committed records Gilbert’s surrender to that marriage, said Lizzie Skurnick in TheDailyBeast.com, it often seems to sound “the final death knell” of the notion of the single life as a feminine ideal.

That won’t be the only reason Gilbert’s fans will be disappointed, said Katie Roiphe in Slate.com. “For a certain kind of girlish introspection to work, it needs an operatic situation.” In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert was bouncing back from suicidal despair; in Committed, she’s merely having doubts about legally marrying a man she’s already pledged her life to. Because she exorcises this skepticism by undertaking a strikingly unoriginal study of the history of marriage, “there are vast swaths of Committed that are boring or even embarrassing.” The “strain” of trying to make this hunt entertaining “is as palpable as the voice is cute,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. It makes one wonder if the undeniable appeal of Gilbert’s megahit was “a happy accident.”

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Gilbert’s voice hasn’t changed that drastically, said Malena Watrous in the San Francisco Chronicle. Still “smart but unpretentious, funny, warm, and generous,” it makes even the slow sections feel like chitchat with a friend. True to her reputation, Gilbert is very good at charming strangers into opening up, as she does when quizzing Vietnamese villagers about their own marital views. Maybe readers just have to accept that at heart she’s more a “breezily accessible” journalist than a memoirist, said Samantha Dunn in the Los Angeles Times. “The problem is” that she’s written a memoir, and a memoir needs more story than she has and more intimacy than she’s willing to share.