When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it's not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John's ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife. As Jane's career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout five house moves, two failed businesses, and a steady draining of the family finances, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is until John leaves her.
Seethes with rage ... With a surgeon’s precision, Manguso painstakingly autopsies a couple’s unfolding — and increasingly toxic — relationship, chronicling each and every symptom of its pathology. If that sounds like a formula for an unsettling novel, you wouldn’t be wrong ... In recent years, it has become commonplace for writers to portray marriage — and motherhood, too — as a cross between joy and horror. There’s much horror here, minus the joy, except that Manguso is a masterful sentence writer and a brutally honest surveyor of the disadvantages women endure.
An unflagging and acridly funny assault on that story, but also a formally canny study of how such tales get told — and how fragile our replacements may turn out ... John is very much his own creep, but also quite generic ... A question the novel will not easily answer: How to know when you are telling stories to those you love, let alone to yourself?
