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.