THE BREAKAWAY, by Jennifer Weiner
Abby Stern, the 33-year-old protagonist of “The Breakaway,” Jennifer Weiner’s delicious new novel, has no idea what she’s doing with her life. For now — late summer of 2023 — she’s leading a 700-mile bike trip from New York City to Niagara Falls. She leaves Mark, her boyfriend, back in Philadelphia. He’s decent and handsome and he’s her fat camp sweetheart from childhood. They’re almost living together. And he’s a Jewish doctor. Perfection, no?
I mean, sure, there’s Abby’s Page-5 fling with the hot guy from the bar. But it’s practically a prologue! It’s two years before the book even really starts. No need to get too agitated about it, right?
Except Weiner knows that we know better. She understands that we understand romantic conventions. Such as: All is not usually as it first seems. And delightful clues abound. For example, Abby’s almost-fiancé? He eats baba ghanouj with a spoon — like a monster! — instead of scooping it up with pita chips like a human being would. He eats bunless turkey burgers. And, perhaps most significant: He hides Abby’s ice cream and throws away her leftover pork buns.
These are notable details because, among other reasons, Abby is fat and she loves sex and food. That’s why Sebastian, the hot guy from the bar, is impossible to forget. He didn’t just smolder willy-nilly: He devoured Abby; he fed her unctuous carbs; he called her “pretty thing.” While Mark is, thanks to gastric bypass surgery, a boringly born-again skinny person. Plus, he’s actually, and dully, a podiatrist (although Abby does enjoy his pictures of malformed toenails).
So are we surprised when Sebastian, of all people, turns up as a rider on Abby’s trip? We are not.
None of the above is to suggest that this book is formulaic. In fact, it’s slyly, delectably subversive. For one thing, our hero is not a helpless woman who needs to be rescued from her own appetites; she’s not a beauty trapped inside a beast. She is (more or less) perfect all along (or at least as close to perfect as any of us are). For another, Weiner a best-selling author with over 11 million books in print and over 150,000 followers on Twitter/X, uses her enormous platform — and not for the first time — to lobby gorgeously for bodily autonomy. No real spoilers here, I hope, but one of the riders turns out to be a pregnant teenager and, because of post-Roe obstructions, it takes a village to help her realize her choices. What do women get to do with their bodies? may be the central question of “The Breakaway,” and Weiner answers it brilliantly.
In the meantime, the novel hums along through the various legs of the bike ride, sharing different points of view along the way, including that of a surprise addition to the tour: Abby’s own fat-shaming mother, who “treated Abby like a problem in need of solving instead of asking, even once, whether it was the world, not her daughter, that might have been wrong.” She, too, has secrets of her own.
The bicycling itself? I love the fact that all of these different bodies are getting themselves where they’re going, but I don’t really care about the details. That’s probably because where I live, all the riders whiz past scoldingly, as if every day is the Tour de France. Also, I don’t like the word “derailleur” (whatever it means) and I don’t need to hear about the chamois lining of anybody’s shorts. But who cares? Weiner has already baked my critique into her novel, describing the way one rider felt like just one more stereotypical jerk cyclist, “clad in entitlement and spandex.”
“The Breakaway” is sexy and suspenseful and so much fun, even as it asks us to imagine lives unconstrained by convention or the Supreme Court. It’s the lobster roll you get with mayo and melted butter — because why choose? To quote Mary Oliver grossly out of context, “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” whether it’s noodles or romance or even the uncertainty that comes with getting to decide who we want to be.
Catherine Newman is the author of “We All Want Impossible Things.”
THE BREAKAWAY | By Jennifer Weiner | 400 pp. | Atria | $28.99
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