Hausfrau (2015)
Jill Alexander Essbaum (1971)
351 pages
“Anna was a good wife, mostly,” serves as both the subtitle, and the opening line, of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau. The title translates from German as housewife, and to her family, friends and neighbors, Anna does appear to be “a good wife.” Within the first few pages, however, the “mostly” aspect becomes clear: for reasons she herself struggles to understand, Anna is desperately unsatisfied with her life, and is cheating on her husband, having sex with relative strangers. She drifts impetuously into these affairs, though she finds that they bring her little real pleasure, filling her instead with a melancholy and self-doubt that only exacerbate her depression.
Essbaum sets the story in Switzerland, where Anna lives as an American ex-patriate in a small town outside Zurich, with her Swiss husband and their three young children. Despite having spent the past nine years in Switzerland, Anna speaks only elementary German, and the local Schwiizerdütsch hardly at all. She has only a vague idea of what her husband does as a mid-level bank manager, and she has made little effort to either integrate herself into the local society or make any close friends. Her feelings of loneliness and isolation are compounded by her recognition that she plays a significant role in creating the conditions of her own unhappiness. This realization fails, however, to be sufficiently powerful to shake her out of her precarious behavior; it serves instead only to tighten her spiral of despair.
As the story opens, Anna has begun taking a German class, at the urging of a psychiatrist she has been seeing in the hopes of understanding and overcoming what her husband refers to as her “melancholy huffs.” Already on the first day of class she hooks up with a fellow student, beginning an affair with him that has them meeting after class, and even skipping class altogether, to have sex in his apartment. As she swings between a self-loathing that makes her what to stop the affair, and a rationalization that makes it seem acceptable and even justifiable, the risk of discovery from her erratic behavior mounts. When her world is suddenly turned upside down by a shocking and tragic event for which she feels complicit, Anna's carefully constructed, if wildly fragile web of fiction --- both in what she displays to those around her, as well as in what she tells herself --- begins to rapidly unravel, to a dramatic conclusion.
That conclusion, I will say, felt a bit improbably when it arrived, though admittedly upon reflection it was quite clearly foreshadowed in the opening pages of the story. Without giving too much away, the novel for me did not generate enough sympathy and empathy for Anna in its first half, to allow one to convincingly follow her to the eventual conclusion of the second half.
Essbaum splits the story into three sections, labeled September, October and November. Within that overarching, linear time-line, however, she moves freely between the past, present and future, even over the course of a single scene. Thus, moments when Ann is at a party, or in her German class, or cheating on her husband, will contain flashbacks to earlier events, and will also not necessarily play out in real-time --- we sometimes learn the outcome or some aspects of a scene before we find out earlier portions of it.
Interspersed throughout the story are snippets of appointments Anna has with her psychiatrist; these discussions serve as a view into Anna’s psyche, as she is forced to confront her true feelings, at least in her own thoughts, if not always what she tells the psychiatrist. Anna’s participation in the German class provides a window into her internal struggles, as she compares aspects of her feelings to vagaries of German grammar --- a minor plot point, but an intriguing one for readers who have learned German.
The pacing of Hausfrau has a bit of watching someone construct a house of cards, though the stakes are of course far greater. The first half of the novel develops gradually, almost languidly, as the reader watches Anna haphazardly pass through her life assembling a framework of lies. Long periods of her slowly piling casual, if conflicted, deceits one on top of another are interspersed with brief moments of terror as the rickety structure threatens to collapse from close brushes of discovery. The pace accelerates to a breakneck speed in the second half of the story, however, as Anna frantically tries to hold herself together in order to sustain the untenable fiction of a life that she has created.
Other reviews / information:
The blurb at the top of the cover of the paperback version reads
“In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.” --- TIMEThough there are bits of similarity to each of those novels, I find the quote more than a bit overdone in terms of the plot comparisons. Just taking, for example, the Fifty Shades reference: although there are a few paragraphs of explicit verbal foreplay --- indeed with quite ‘Grey-ish’ activities mentioned --- a few paragraphs in over 350 pages doesn’t seem to warrant the comparison.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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