Despite The Meaning of Wife’s provocative cover (a woman’s hand with the ring-finger extended, instead of the middle), and its publisher’s prediction that this book will be “one of the most talked about of the season,” it is quite possible to wade through its three hundred pages without detecting any significant provocation, or even much of a thesis at all.

The Meaning of Wife attempts to examine the many connotations taken on by the term “wife” over the last 40 years. The notion of being a wife, it seems, has now a wide variety of different meanings to different women, and to the same women on different days, and to the same women at the same time. The term can both repulse and entrance. For every step forward in its meaning, a backlash and counterbacklash has appeared, and there really aren’t any cultural icons out there yet that we can look to (assuming we even care) for an idea of what a contemporary, progressive wife could be. Fair enough. But what on earth feels new or controversial about any of that?

Kingston, a National Post columnist, doesn’t do herself any favours by opening and closing the book with references to Princess Di. The book is peppered with descriptions of famous women whose lives have already been overexamined. What more can we possibly learn from the fact that Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey are single? What can we gain by reading anything else about Nicole Brown, Hillary Clinton, Ivana Trump, Lorena Bobbitt or, so help us all, fictional characters like Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal, and Carrie Bradshaw?

Asides about the way De Beers markets engagement rings, or how many famous homemakers were actually women who craved independence and a life outside the home, give pause for thought. But for broad strokes, Kingston would have done much better to focus on what “ordinary” wives are doing in practice to get around traditional stereotypes and constraints – their lives, as she admits, being far more nuanced than those of any icon.