(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.
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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.
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