How Can You Possibly Outdo "Eat, Pray, Love"?

Photograph of Elizabeth Gilbert by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

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Poor Elizabeth Gilbert. There was almost no way that she could follow her gigantic, blockbusting megasuccess, Eat Pray Love, with a book that would not disappoint her fans and feed the vicious schadenfreude of her detractors. Her new book, Committed, will most likely do both those things. One can’t necessarily stage a highly structured nervous breakdown set on three continents every couple of years, and we should be willing to forgive Gilbert her effort to keep writing nonetheless.

A tortured introduction reveals that she has, in fact, been a little anxious about trying to write in the long, lucrative shadow of her first memoir. “It has been a bit of a perplexity for me to figure out how, after that phenomenon, I would ever write unself-consciously again. Not to act all falsely nostalgic for literary obscurity …” And that is, as one reads these unnaturally strained paragraphs, exactly the question raised in the reader’s mind. Will she ever write unselfconsciously again? In several painful passages about working in a tomato patch, one feels the presence of a writer frantically trying to write like Elizabeth Gilbert, and it doesn’t much matter that that writer is Elizabeth Gilbert.

Even at her best, Gilbert’s prose always skirts self-consciousness; it tries very, very hard in the manner of a charming and talkative guest at a drinks party who will not rest until every single person in the room—and the dog and cat—likes her. (“If there is a more likeable writer than Gilbert currently in print, I haven’t found him or her,” the New York Times review of Eat Pray Love noted.) In Eat Pray Love, Gilbert discusses and mocks that quality in herself, that near-pathological and preternatural likeability, but in Committed, the belabored quality gets the better of the book; it eclipses her charm.

It doesn’t necessarily help that there is innately less dramatic potential in this new situation. Eat Pray Love was about the heartbreak of her marriage breaking up and her subsequent effort in Italy, India, and Bali to pull herself together. Committed is about her slight skittishness about marrying a man she loves. I say “slight” because there is not much suspense about whether or not they will get married—and even less about whether it ultimately matters much to their relationship whether they do or don’t. The stakes in Committed just aren’t all that high. Gilbert herself points out, “there was no sane reason to assume that things would not ultimately work out just fine for Felipe and me,” which is not a hugely promising starting point for a book-length analysis. For a certain kind of girlish introspective writing to work, it needs an operatic situation; it needs suicidally depressed or, at least, brokenhearted. Moderately skeptical won’t do the trick.

The problem, I suppose, is the thinking. Elizabeth Gilbert, for all her verve and appeal, is not a thinker. Where Eat Pray Love was a memoir in the pure, seductive, exhibitionistic tradition of the genre, this book has some sociological aspirations. She seems, at times, in her own uncomfortable, self-deprecating way, to be trying for a history or analysis of the institution of marriage. Her new status as bestselling author seems to have endowed her with some responsibility to write about the larger culture, which is the central problem with the book. Her research on marriage is poorly digested and, ultimately, not all that compelling. The general lessons she comes out with—like “romantic love is a universal human experience”—are not all that revelatory. It’s when she reverts to narrating her own circumstances that the writing is strongest. (One hates to be the reviewer to say Elizabeth Gilbert should stick with memoir and never aspire to anything different, but this experiment in cultural analysis is not a resounding success.)