When the heart wants what it wants
Still Life With Husband
By Lauren Fox
Knopf, 258 pp., $22.95
Chicklitland. Elevation: a few feet above sea level, occasional swampy tracts. Population: young wives on extended maternity leave, like it or not, from the professions their husbands are free to practice. Fantasies: Hugh Grant-like interlopers; pints of fudgy ice cream. Weather: humid-sunny, with an occasional flicker of adulterous heat lightning. Principal export: wit, of the kind that gropes you for a response; the book reading the reader. Language: comic-rueful.
Emily, in Lauren Fox's debut novel "Still Life With Husband," has many of the national qualifications. Kevin, her husband, is amiably boring. She is stirred by a coffee-shop encounter with David: a tall, shy, well-spoken, long-scarf-unwinding, dark-hair-nicely-flopping young man (sue him, Grant). She eats muffins (food as love) with a sensible confidante. An earlier romantic mishap has her devouring (more food as love) "a pint of Triple Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Truffle ice cream."
She is narrator as well as protagonist, which gives a sense of tidy control over the story and its emotions. The sense is heightened by a self-description that matches the author's jacket photograph: frizzy dark hair, a prominent nose.
Fox, though, manages to sneak Emily across Chicklitland's borders into a a place of greater seriousness; call it Litland. ( Not permanently ; there are weekend trips home. ) The cute gives way, frequently, to the acute. The comic ruefulness leaches into pain. Real actions in this neighboring country have real, perhaps irreversible consequences. The genre's easy clichés are replaced by moments of wit that instead of skimming trodden ground cut unexpectedly deep before titupping back.
Even to sum up the story is to fall into cliché; what Fox contributes, though not always, is an intelligent and well-written gloss. It is a Bovary story after all: Bored woman has adulterous affair, ruins her marriage, and loses her lover. Instead of perishing, though, she gains a dubious redemption (the shakiest part of the book). Fox is no Flaubert; on the other hand Emily, unlike "poor, foolish Emma," is all insight -- to the point, at times, of making us wish that after "Know thyself," Socrates had thought to add: "But shut up about it sometimes."
Kevin, who sincerely loves Emily, finds adventurous fulfillment in writing clear consumer instructions for tools and appliances. Emily finds no fulfillment at all in part-time editing for a scholarly journal dealing with male sexual organs . Her marriage "is like reading the same novel over and over again." Kevin's insistence that they have a baby and leave the city for a suburb eventually sends her into action.
E-mails with David follow. At first the two make a business like pretense of discussing a possible writing assignment. Then comes coffee with hours of show-and-tell and much adhesive staring. Then a long walk in the park, the imminent certainty of a kiss, a guilty recoil. Fox does it crisply: "Oh! Okay, well. I really should go. Bye!" says Emily, and off she bolts. A breach, a coming-together, a nervous assignation. The nerves are done with a mix of pain and passion. Then a series of bedroom meetings where, with the writing at its strongest, passion is done with exhilaration and gaiety. Then of course, David grows busy, distracted, and conveniently conscious-stricken. And Kevin finds out and, no longer bland, pronounces a near- biblical Begone!
Thus the old Oliver Goldsmith refrain: "When lovely lady stoops to folly and learns too late that men betray" etc. In fact Fox adds a dreadful paradox -- too ingenious to be told -- to Emily's plight. But this is a contemporary novel, and a woman needs a man like a bicycle needs a meat cleaver ; so of course there is a solution, though rather cheesy .
Throughout, Fox frequently does the turns with real elegance. At the height of adulterous exhilaration, Emily feels a generous benevolence toward Kevin, and above all a sense of omnipotence at her marital juggle, along with less-than-gnawing (nibbling perhaps) guilt. And in the midst of a passionate bedding, the author does a parodic riff on "the earth shook" cliché, with a pseudo-scholarly discussion of earthquakes that manages to zero in on Emily's messy confusion.
At its best, "Still Life With Husband" -- ingenious title -- is adept at elucidating the feelings of its protagonist (nobody else gets much of a run, though the mute portrait of Kevin, her husband, can be suggestive). What it fails at is elucidating the one who feels, or getting us to care much about her. Emily's remarks about herself are more interesting than she is; and, as Gertrude Stein observed: "Remarks aren't literature."
Richard Eder writes book reviews for several publications. 
