“The Uncoupling” is a work of archaeology as well as literature. On the surface it is a domestic novel, set in an ordinary home in the American suburbs. Its focus is on characters in families as they go about their ordinary lives.

These characters behave in familiar ways and struggle with issues we see all the time in magazines and newspaper features sections: How to keep love alive in a marriage! What to do when the passion is gone! How to react when your teenager retreats to her room!

Zoom in through the kitchen window on Robby and Dory Lang, a couple in their mid-40s, both English teachers at Eleanor Roosevelt High in the fictional town of Stellar Plains, N.J. From every angle, it’s a great marriage: sex, love, support and friendship all thriving. The Langs’ 16-year-old daughter, Willa, is a bit shy and uncommunicative, but no alarm bells are going off there.

Then comes the chill wind, the inexplicable moment when Dory no longer wants to have sex with her husband. No explanation; desire gives way to disgust (perhaps too strong a word, but she does recoil). We are still on the surface — this phenomenon happens every day. But the chill wind that swirled around Dory begins to appear in other bedrooms in the school’s community. The novel now takes on the feel of a thriller; something sinister lurks at the margins.

Enter Fran Heller, the new drama teacher, who moves in across the street with her son, Eli. Soon Willa and Eli, both unlikely candidates, are caught up in the gravitational pull of sex. There’s no stopping it; it’s all they think about.

Fran chooses a play for the students to perform: Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” written in 411 B.C. We descend to the next level.

“Lysistrata” was written against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, which took the lives of 30 to 50 percent of the citizens of Athens. In this bawdy comedy, the women of Athens go on strike, refusing sex to their men until they stop the war. Sex for peace. “Lysistrata” is a powerful play; it has inspired conversation through the ages.

“Lysistrata” brings a spell to Stellar Plains, and with it, the chill wind that unravels relationships, families and the community.

One by one, the female teachers are struck: Bev, the 52-year-old counselor who has gained too much weight and whose husband thoughtlessly points it out, tells him she is ending what is left of their love life. Ruth, the gym teacher with twin boys and a sculptor husband, tells them that she is through with men. Leanne, another counselor who is having multiple affairs, including one with the principal, decides to end her liaisons. Willa breaks poor Eli’s heart.

It’s an epidemic.

Picture, beneath both levels, a great aquifer of love and death, from which the chill wind rises and twists around the characters. It is the human subconscious, the place where strong drives of creation and destruction battle.

Once Wolitzer has her pieces in place (this is her eighth novel; she knows how to put her pieces in place), the great challenge is to keep the wind blowing. Without that breath, the novel would be a house of cards.

Wolitzer pulls it off; and the characters, these relentlessly ordinary people, do not know what has hit them. She deftly shifts the narrator’s voice to the chorus — an impassive but empathetic observer who bears witness to the spell and its effects.

The novel builds to a crescendo — the opening night of the play, which becomes a play within a play, within a play, within a novel.

We cannot leave the theater with a new lease on life, but we readers can put the book down with some kind of epiphany regarding the aquifer, the ordinary rituals and roles we rehearse again and again in our suburban lives, and maybe even the profound sources of artistic expression.

When we feel the same chill wind, we might recognize it as something more ancient than 411 B.C., than war, or sex, or love.

 

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