Tag Archives: Adultery

Vow: A Memoir of Marriage and Infidelity by Wendy Plump

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Synopsis:
A journalist details the multiple affairs that ended her marriage.

Review:
The story told in Vow is a train wreck. Wendy Plump and her husband pretty much destroyed their marriage with infidelity on both sides, ending finally when her husband had a baby with another woman. For all her candor, I never felt like Plump got to the heart of why she did what she did, or responded the way she did, or how she feels about the endeavor of marriage in general. I understand that you can’t boil someone’s life choices down to a set of pat answers, but at a certain point I just felt trapped inside a vortex of emotion and desire and need and couldn’t find a way to escape. That said, I appreciated her honesty and willingness to tell the truth even when it made her look bad.

Many thanks to Bloomsbury USA for the review copy.

The St. Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

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Synopsis:
When the servants of the residents of a tony London neighborhood get together to try to improve their collective lot, they have no way of knowing that their cozy way of life is about to explode–thanks to the secrets they’re all protecting.

Review:
The St. Zita Society took some time for me to warm up to it, mainly because there was no one I felt like I could connect with. But Rendell is such a brilliant writer that she kept me interested, and when it ended I was pleased with the masterful way she manipulated my sympathies. Plus the mystery itself is a fun one, because we know the identity of the murderer before it happens, but there’s still plenty of suspense and tension.

Motherland by Amy Sohn

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Synopsis:
Interlocking tales of some tortured moms and dads living high on the hog in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Review:
I do not know why I kept reading Motherland, I didn’t connect with any of the characters and I was seriously worried about the safety of all their children. I had enjoyed her previous novel, Prospect Park West, mostly because as a New York mom myself I am not immune to the pleasures of schadenfreude. But with this book, I couldn’t enjoy any of it because everyone was just so utterly miserable and it was easy to see how it was all their own damn faults.

I do have to credit Amy Sohn with her talent for astute cultural commentary, and despite my feelings about this book I’m sure I’ll read her next one.

The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell

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Synopsis:
A poverty-stricken writer flees a failed affair, but things may have already gone too far.

Review:
The Face of Trespass is an early novel by one of my favorite writers, Ruth Rendell. It’s a short book and a quick read, yet packed with psychological complexity and fascinating characters. I loved the hermeticism of Gray’s world and his believably strange relationship with his French stepfather Honoré. Not as transcendent as some of her best works (Judgment in Stone in particular) but well worth the read.

This Glittering World by T. Greenwood

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Synopsis:
After the body of a badly beaten Navajo man is discovered in the snow outside his home, Ben Bailey takes the investigation into his own hands, with devastating consequences for his own disordered life.

Review:
With every book of hers I read, I become convinced that T. Greenwood is my favorite contemporary author. This Glittering World is one of her best yet, achieving the same level of intensity and feeling as her second novel (and my favorite) Nearer than the Sky.

Protagonist Ben Bailey’s life is at a crossroads. He may or may not be in love with his live-in girlfriend Sara. He teaches history at Northern Arizona University, and he’s supposed to want tenure, but prefers bartending instead. The only thing really knows for sure is that he loves the way the snowstorms cover Flagstaff in an instant, blanketing everything with the sweet, undeniable nothingness he craves for his own life.

The murder mystery at the heart of this novel is compelling for its off-screen brutality. Even while the details remain unknown, Ricky Begay’s end is heartbreakingly easy to imagine. Ben rediscovers his heart and his sense of justice trying to solve the crime–but his instant attraction to Ricky’s older sister Shadi complicates things intensely.

Greenwood brings Flagstaff to light in all its eccentricity. It reminded me of Austin, Texas, and I really want to visit there someday. Her characters are complicated times a million, and despite the sadness pervading the book’s every page, I was swept away by their story because I could connect with all of them on a deep level. In a literary culture where too many authors write to the book club, Greenwood is foisting her unique and compelling point of view on the world with no compromises. More please!

Foxybaby and The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

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With reading time at a premium due to an active 3-year-old and a high needs 4-month-old, I’m not able to dive into all the worthy books that are sent my way for review. So this will be a bit out of form for the Superfast Reader, more of an endorsement than a review, since I was only able to give these books a perusal instead of a read. But they are absolutely worth recommending, for their literary merit and sheer originality.

Foxybaby follows a writer with punk rock sensibilities through her residency at a weight loss camp for adults. The tone is blackly comic, but with a beating heart of real passion and humanity. For as grotesque as some of Jolley’s characters are, she never condescends to them. I was reminded so much of Jane Campion’s movie Sweetie–and that’s a high compliment.

The Sugar Mother is about a middle aged academic who falls in love with a much-younger woman, and then wants her to be a surrogate for him and his wife. I was less taken with this one, finding the scenario a bit distasteful, but the writing was psychologically astute and enjoyable as hell.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

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Synopsis:
The anti-love story of an American marriage.

Review:
Freedom is a terribly generic name for a totally original novel. I’d prefer “Songs for Walter” or even “Mistakes Were Made.” I’m really not sure how that one slipped by.

Anyway. Thoroughly engrossing read about people making each other miserable. It reminded me a lot of Revolutionary Road, a favorite of mine (despite the suckitatious movie). The psychological torture that the characters inflict on one another is exquisite and acute, but somehow hopelessly romantic, too.

Franzen is so ambitious, not content to tell a small story about people who can’t figure it out. He also brings in corrupt Iraq War defense contractors, the housing bubble, and punks turned alt-country, making the novel a stunningly executed portrait of America of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. He also throws in a bucket of melodrama. It all really works.

The Son Avenger by Sigrid Undset (The Master of Hestviken)

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Synopsis:
With Olav Audunsson facing the end of his lonely days, his children Eirik and Cecilia find themselves trapped in the repercussions of Olav’s as-yet unconfessed sins.

Review:
There was so much I loved in The Son Avenger, particularly Cecilia’s journey of wife- and motherhood with Eirik’s less-than-reputable childhood friend Jorund. She really came alive as a different kind of woman than the others I’ve seen in Undset’s work, with a rigidity that blossomed into self-awareness and even a kind of independence. She’s mirrored nicely with Eldred, the woman Eirik falls in love with later in the book, and together they show that the feudal system and all its concomitant restrictions on people were not enough to break at least two women.

Undset was writing in the 1920s, and I find her approaches to class and sex to be refreshingly ahead of her time. It would probably be stretching things to call her a feminist, but there is an egalitarian quality to her character depictions that questions the power dynamic between the genders in a way that feels radical for both her time and the time she’s writing about. But because she’s deeply Christian, she isn’t going to let go of the notion of necessary submission as a vitally important character quality. In many ways, her characters live out St. Pauls’s teaching that in relation to God, we are all feminine.

Turning to the men, I was less excited by how Undset completed the journeys of Olav and Eirik. I really feel like Olav got let off the hook for his crimes, but that could be my 21st century desire for openness and transparency, since Olav does, in a sense, lose everything. Grown Eirik didn’t resemble boy Eirik enough for me to be swept away in the continuity of his story, and the ambiguous ending that Undset creates for him doesn’t help matters.

I’m so glad I made my way through this series, though it will never eclipse my beloved Kristin Lavransdatter.

The Snake Pit by Sigrid Undset (The Master of Hestviken)

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Synopsis:
Olav Audunsson finally brings Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter back to his ancestral home as his wife, each harboring a dark secret that threatens the happiness they dreamed of as children.

Review:
The Snake Pit follows closely on the tragic events of The Axe, focusing on the far-reaching effects of sin in the lives of Olav and his childhood love Ingunn, now his wife.

I really don’t want to give too much away about the story thus far, because I loved how it unfolded in the previous book, and that makes it hard to write a comprehensive review. But as in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, Undset excels in showing how sin and unrepentance isolate the sinner from community, even the intimate community of marriage. She also shows the interconnectedness of deceit and grasping ambition with a psychological and theological complexity that you just don’t find very often.

I am loving this series, though I haven’t connected with any of the characters the way I did with my beloved Kristin. I’m okay with that–particularly as we get a nice cameo from Kristin’s father Lavrans and mother Ragnfrid near the end of the book!

The Axe by Sigrid Undset (The Master of Hestviken)

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Synopsis:
Betrothed as children, Olav and Ingunn grew up together, but when Ingunn’s parents die, they take an irrevocable step that jeopardizes their futures and the social system that surrounds them.

Review:
The Axe begins a 4-book series by Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the acclaimed and beloved Kristin Lavransdatter books.

Like that series, The Axe concerns itself heavily with matters of sexual morality and the toxic nature of secret sin, only this time we get the man’s perspective as well. Olav isn’t quite the ravishing seducer that Kristin’s Erlend was, but his seduction of Ingunn is no less rapacious, and the act twists and bends him towards other sins. And Ingunn is no paragon of virtue herself–Undset doesn’t stint on portraying her weaknesses, though in such a way as to make her totally sympathetic and relatable.

Undset really knows how to tell a gripping story. The historical detail never overwhelms the plot, and the characters are as complex as they come. My only criticism is that Tiina Nunnally didn’t do the translation. This one has some archaisms that interrupt the flow of the story, but honestly this is a very minor issue.

And I was pleased to learn, via Lars Walker, that yesterday, May 20, was Sigrid Undset’s birthday. I was so pleased to find I was reading one of her books in celebration of one of my favorite authors.