A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

By Elizabeth Gilbert

(Viking; 285 pages; $26.95)

"Committed," the new memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, is being billed as sort of a sequel to "Eat, Pray, Love," no doubt to lure back readers who made her first memoir a runaway best-seller.

For anyone who has been in a coma, "Eat, Pray, Love" was a zeitgeist book - in sales terms, "The Da Vinci Code" for the memoir set - hovering at the top of the list for four years. This is partly due to its subject matter. Following an acrimonious divorce, Gilbert secured a book contract that paid for a year of solo travel, to regain her joie de vivre by doing exactly what she wanted, all the time. Critics faulted her for being self-indulgent, but that was her stated purpose.

Gilbert is, in Oprah terms, "a pleaser." She prides herself on being able to make friends with anyone, and hates conflict. This is how she got stuck in a marriage (and a dull suburban life) she didn't want. Many readers related to her predicament, and lived vicariously through her cure as she chronicled it. Her most devoted fans have actually crossed the globe, tracing her footsteps to the Naples pizzeria she hit on her "no carbs left behind tour," to the ashram in India where she chanted for months, and finally to Bali, where she found sustainable balance between overindulgence and asceticism.

She also found a happily-ever-after ending, falling in love with an older Brazilian man known to readers as "Felipe" - a happy ending that did not include a wedding. He too had suffered a painful divorce, and they swore, "to never, under any circumstances, marry." Privately they pledged lifelong fidelity, and relocated from Bali to (go figure) suburban Philadelphia. But upon attempting to return from a trip abroad, Felipe was detained by Homeland Security and then informed that the only way he might be allowed to re-enter the United States was if he and Gilbert were to marry.

"In the space of only a few hours," writes Gilbert, "my life with Felipe had been neatly flipped upside down, as though by some great cosmic spatula."

Pragmatism trumps principles, and they agree to wed, but it takes 10 more months for the government to grant permission. So while they kick around Southeast Asia, "in a state of rootless exile," Gilbert tries to "make peace with the complicated institution of marriage." She undertakes this with almost nerdy studiousness, poring over history books sent by her librarian sister, and interviewing nearly everyone she meets about marital customs and mores.

True to claim, she excels at drawing people out of their shells, then bringing them to life for the reader. Some of the best scenes in the book show her chatting with unlikely new friends, like a Hmong hill tribe girl in Vietnam and a Laotian man who raises frog meat. Their lively conversations illustrate the different cultural expectations that we bring to marriage, and she concludes that these people seem more content with their marriages because they ask less of them. "Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto that creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate."

The book is strongest when Gilbert focuses on telling her own story. By contrast, heavily researched chapters like "Marriage and History" feel more academic, which would be OK except that she is not making a coherent argument about marriage so much as trying to talk herself into it. At these times, the narrative can feel as directionless as the couple lumbering under their heavy backpacks. Commitment is no escapist fantasy. Felipe does not share Gilbert's zeal for life on the road - he yearns for a coffee pot, symbol of home - and his weariness rubs off on her. At one point, she leaves him to travel to Cambodia, only to find the crushing poverty nearly unbearable. In a wrenching episode that causes her shame, she runs away from a group of begging children who try to trip her.

There is a reason comedies often end with the wedding: Falling in love is sexy; commitment is a grind. While Gilbert and Felipe have to wait until the end of the book for their wedding ceremony, their peripatetic life is far more taxing than a settled marriage, as they struggle to make different temperaments and travel styles mesh. She renders their frustrations convincingly, but readers who delighted in the joie de vivre that bubbled throughout "Eat, Pray, Love" may find this comparatively dreary.

Still, while "Eat, Pray, Love" struck a chord by giving "pleasers" permission to please themselves for a change, it's Gilbert's voice that accounted for its phenomenal success. Smart but unpretentious, funny, warm and generous, this is the same voice behind "Committed." By the end of one of her books, you feel as if she is your friend too. It's a pleasure to be back in that friend's company again.