Husband and Wife: Review and Free Giveaway

Husband and Wife Husband and Wife: Review and Free Giveaway Husband and Wife: A Novel by Leah Stewart

Release date: 2010 / 344 pages

Synopsis (from the back cover): Sarah Price has never regretted trading her MFA for a steady job so that her husband, Nathan, could write fiction. But a age thiry-five, her world is turned upside-down by a shocking revelation: Nathan’s upcoming novel, Infidelity, is based on fact.

First Sentence: My name is Sarah Price, and I’m married to a fiction writer.

Review: While I’m not sure whether or not I actually enjoyed reading this novel, I did find it fascinating on many levels. The premise is revealed in the first chapter — a fiction writer who has finished a much anticipated novel titled Infidelity confesses to his wife that the novel isn’t entirely fiction.

What follows this revelation is an unraveling, a spiraling downwards that reads so intimately I felt as if I was actually reading the wife’s private journal. She makes decisions that are irresponsible and selfish, (but continues to care for her two young children), and obsesses about minutia, often trapped in her musings about her situation or even the present moment:

Here is where we should have had a fade to black. But this was life, and there were no merciful cutaways, only the two of us — his chin pressing rather painfully into my clavicle, his weight bending my upper back forward in an increasingly uncomfortable way — and within seconds of that glorious moment of happy conviction I felt myself drifting back toward the restless ambiguity that characterized my emotional state at that time for a long time after. Picture a wrestling ring. Around the edge circled relief and love and anger and despair, and every so often a couple of them jumped into the ring and tangled and one of them emerged the victor, but mostly it was just them circling that blank gray ring in the center, the empty battleground.

I was fascinated by just how well the reader gets to know the wife and her husband (through the wife’s eyes only). The narrator is truly trying to find herself throughout the novel — trying to discover whether she can be both a mother, wife, and poet; whether she can forgive her husband and remain married; whether or not she can put the needs of her children before her own needs. Throughout, there is a sense of avoidable – or at least preventable – chaos that lingers at the edges of the novel. Yet the actions of all involved are not unexpected — even at the very end.

At times I was impatient — with the husband’s actions that were the catalyst for the novel, with the wife’s myopic self-absorption, with the almost stream-of-consciousness obssession with the narrator’s thoughts. But I also appreciated how authentic and three-dimensional (and fully realized) the characters were, too. Although I wanted Sarah to act differently at times, I know in the same situation I would most likely want to act differently, too. And at times Stewart would find exactly the right words to sum up life experiences that resonated perfectly. For example, after a weekend talk-fest with a college friend:

…the way time, too, twinkled and blurred, the days not about vacuuming up the dog hair or taking out the trash but about what we were thinking, what we wanted to say, so that by the time I got home from these trips I had a talking hangover, worn out by overindulgence in the sound of my own voice.

And after getting pulled over for speeding:

It had been years since a cop had pulled me over, but I recognized this feeling, which was always exactly the same. Agitated suspense and suspension. Scattershot anger at both cop and yourself. The outcome in another’s hands, and nothing to do but wait. Funny how some experiences recur and disappear entirely, like bubbles that form and pop. Most days you forget the feeling of sliding your heels into the metal stirrups at the end of the doctor’s table, of a sinus headache just behind the eyes, of the dull, flat drive between here and elsewhere, of lying awake in the middle of the night. And then there you are again, back in that bubble, and you think, Oh, this. I remember this. Same as it ever was, even as everything else rushes away.

So, while I cannot say I enjoyed reading this novel, I did appreciate it and believe that many other readers would, too.

Interested in winning a free copy? Drop me a comment below and I will choose a lucky winner by the weekend!

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