In Irresistible Forces, Danielle Steel revisits one of her familiar plot hooks: the difficulties created when one party in a marriage wants children and the other doesn’t.
Here the high-power, happily married couple are Steve and Meredith Whitman. Steven is a surgeon in a New York City trauma hospital; Meredith is a Wall Street investment banker. Both are dedicated to their jobs, work long hours, consider themselves happily married.
Steve wants kids. Meredith doesn’t.
Meredith is arranging an IPO for a California tech firm, which means spending a lot of time on the road in the US and Europe with Callan Dow, the firm’s founder and CEO.
Callan is attractive, rich, divorced, with two kids. He tells Meredith that her unwillingness to have a child means she isn’t committed to her marriage. That rattles her, but she ignores it.
After the IPO is a success, Callan offers Meredith a job. Steve urges her to take it; he’ll find a job in California and they can have a baby.
Steel pairs both Meredith and Steve off with new partners.
It’s left to some other novelist to write the story of how both Meredith’s and Steve’s second marriages fail, which they surely will.
Irresistible Forces by Danielle Steel
Delacorte Press. ©1999. 372 p.
1999 bestseller #9; my grade: C-
©2020 Linda G. Aragoni
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