I really enjoyed this one, as have many others – it is on many ‘Book Of They Year’ lists. It tells about a woman living in the suburbs outside New York who has an affair, first imaginary, and then real. It’s generally very funny, but also rather sad. Saying ‘it’s about an affair,’ might make you think it’s some kind of tragic love story, but in fact it’s more about boredom and mortality.
There is a lot of angst about having decided to leave the city for upstate New York: “People back in Brooklyn thought you were Henry David Thoreau, but then they came to visit and saw that you lived in a vinyl-siding house. It was only rustic in that you could not get good Thai food.”
There’s also career angst. The main character, Cora, has a dull job, having downgraded her ambition around network television after an internship showed her how much work it was:
“To do something you believed in or enjoyed, you had to throw yourself at it like Eliot or Jules. Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a no-nonsense lady, like Barbara Walters or Gayle King. It had hurt her to learn that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.”
And then comes the affair partner, who when she first sees him she notes: “He wore socks printed with fir trees and a chambray shirt. His jeans were only mildly terrible.”
This jeans comment really makes me lol. This is indeed the low bar straight women accept from straight men. So much of the story is about the imaginary affair that when the real affair happens, it is inevitably something of a let down. I really liked this, as a commentary on the actual affair: “The shabbiness of real life. You had to admire its consistency”
It is kind of interesting how the affair does not seem to affect her love for her husband. It’s more her working through her own feelings of emptiness. I note again, just like SO YOUNG, SO OLD, that friendships are once again presented as difficult and superficial. I don’t know if that’s just what happens to youwhen you move to the subrubs, but I’m not about ot find out.
Once the affair is real, the imaginary life becomes one where she has a third child with her husband. I like this line, from an acquaintance, when she decided not to have the child partly because she fears what it will do to her body:
“Your body is going to a grave, said the woman. To a landfill. It’s a single-use item. You might as well wreck it.”