Here is someone who has a mental breakdown because she gets cheated on. I don’t know, I know it’s not very nice, but my view is: toughen the f**k up.
Partly this view comes from the fact that this novel refuses to give any character a name, calling the main one ‘the wife,’ and the other one ‘the husband.’ I always find this profoundly pretentious. Even worse, at the end, it abruptly shifts to using the first person singular. I mean: VOM. And all this to mostly tell the story of this couple who moves out of Brooklyn to the suburbs because it is cheaper.
That said, here are two things I did like:
One, a quote from an 1896 book on advice for brides:
The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to .which ‘a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart . . . it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities
I have long wondered why I am indifferent to domestic duties.
Two, this which I find sadly and profoundly true:
But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.