TITLE: Hausfrau
AUTHOR: Jill Alexander Essbaum
GENRE: General Fiction
PUBLISHED: March 17, 2015
RATING: ★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism
Description: Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning—“a modern-day Anna Karenina tale.”
Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
Review: "A bored woman is a dangerous woman." Dangerous, because she will do foolish things to fill her days, to end the monotony, to attempt to fill her emotional needs. Anyone who has read Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina know this to be true. Hausfrau is a nod to both these novels. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina are both married women who try to escape and find solace through affairs. And like the characters of those two well-known novels, Anna Benz also is a lonely, bored housewife - an expat American married to a Swiss man, living in Switzerland with her three children. From her arrival in Switzerland as a pregnant newlywed, she has felt disconnected from the Swiss people, unloved by her in-laws, unappreciated by her emotionally distant husband - but she makes little effort to belong. She rejects potential friends, makes no effort to learn local customs, and up until recently, refuses to learn more than the bare minimum of the language.
Passivity is the main theme in Hausfrau. Throughout the novel, the author continually describes Anna as "passive" or with adjectives that are synonyms...
passive - adjective 1. accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance. "the women were portrayed as passive victims"
synonyms: submissive, acquiescent, unresisting, unassertive, compliant, pliant, obedient, docile, tractable, malleable, pliable "passive victims"
Most of the time, Anna's passivity, or "allowing what happens" to her comes in the form of affairs with various men she meets along the way. Other times, it is found in the manner she is treated by others, or allows others to treat her. In addition to witnessing sex scenes which she falls into in a typically passive way, the reader accompanies Anna to her sessions with her analyst (where she passively participates, sometimes as little as possible) - and then to school, where as an uncharacteristic positive step, she is (finally!) learning German.
Anna's German language teacher notes her passivity and chides her for making repetitive mistakes...
"Anna took easy offense at this even though she knew that there was a tipping point in mistake making when blunders stopped being instructive and became simply habitual. A cards-land-where-they-may approach to moving through language, through love, through life. Unflappable passivity in action."
Anna's analyst also notices Anna's passivity...
“Narcissism isn't vanity, Anna. We're all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine's abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman.”
The author is a poet with several published works, but this is her first foray into fiction. Somehow, even though the character is so passive that I often pictured her as boneless and floppy as a rag doll, I stayed consistently interested in the plot. One of the reasons: Essbaum knows how to write great sex scenes. I am no romance reader, I need good writing to get me interested, and romance novels generally lack this quality; the writing is typically horrid. In addition, romance novels generally have cheesy porn-like dialogue, and silly descriptions of genitals and sexual acts, which is a huge turnoff to me. Romance novels also have endless physical descriptions of the characters, who are all physically perfect, but generally childlike, immature and petulant emotionally. Not so in Hausfrau. Anna's lovers were all different, and each were real people in their own right, imperfect and whole in a way that speaks to me. Sex scenes are portrayed frankly and as a matter-of-fact, and integrated into the story appropriately. Its writing is clear, concise and beautiful. This is the kind of sex scene I like to read:
Anna let her hand glide up her husband’s thigh. Bruno made a hard, hot groan. Anna bit his ear, sucked the lobe. I want you to fuck my mouth, she said. Fuck my mouth then shove your cock in my ass. Bruno kept his eyes to the road but sped up all the same. I want you to scrub my pussy with your face, Bruno. I want you to suck on my clit until it’s as fat as a cherry. When they got to the house he pulled in fast and parked the car at a crooked angle. This was something he never did, too regimented and square cornered he was. They began undressing before they even fully stepped inside. Jackets were abandoned in the boot room. Anna cast her shoes and dress aside in the entryway. Bruno’s shirt fell away in the hall. There, Bruno grabbed Anna’s arm above the elbow and pulled her roughly into the bedroom behind him.
God, he’s so fucking handsome. Anna allowed herself this swoon. I forgot how handsome he was. Even for a Swiss man Bruno was tall; at a slouch he stood six foot four. His eyes were hazel—yellow and brown like a tiger’s-eye jewel. His chest was broad and beautiful, silken and downy. The hair on his head, the hair on his body the rustic brown of fresh-turned soil. His forearms were veiny, strong like a carpenter’s. His nose, more Aryan than Alemannic, ran straight as a taut line of string from its bridge to its tip. His were the features of an aristocrat; he was the physical heir of another era. And his cock. Anna loved Bruno’s cock. Of all the cocks belonging to all her lovers past or present, Bruno’s was the largest. Erect, it was nearly as long as a dinner knife and as big around as the face of a man’s pocket watch. Uncut. Precision straight. It was obscene, aggressive, and in just a minute it would split her apart. Anna had never been able to slide more than half of it into her mouth. Her orgasms were painful, exquisite affairs.
Now, until this precise moment, Bruno had sounded exceedingly boring - but I instantly forgot all his flaws.
But enough of that! Hausfrau is more than just a bored housewife drifting through life. It is more than well written sex scenes. In the last few chapters, Anna is blind-sided by unthinkable tragedy - the death of someone close to her, someone with whom she shared a secret. Unfortunately, she bullied this person to intimidate them into keeping her secret. This behavior becomes unforgivable after this person's death. How would a person as passive as Anna react? Someone so unable to take charge, someone who doesn't have the strength to reframe or change her life? We find out in the last chapter. Essbaum's description of Anna's grieving shows her writing skills...
"There are two types of grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate’s family’s grief. See that pain in the distance? It’s on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down.
Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can't be bandaged. The wound is mortal and yet you do not die. That is its own impossible agony. But grief is not simple sadness. Sadness is a feeling that wants nothing more than to be sat with, held, and heard. Grief is a journey. It must be moved through. With a rucksack full of rocks, you hike through a black, pathless forest, brambles about your legs and wolf packs at your heels. The grief that never moves is called complicated grief. It doesn't subside, you do not accept it, and it never—it never—goes to sleep. This is possessive grief. This is delusional grief. This is hysterical grief. Run if you will, this grief is faster. This is the grief that will chase you and beat you. This is the grief that will eat you.”
Until the last chapters, the plot of Hausfrau moved along steadily, albeit in the meandering way that Anna herself drifts through life, stumbling headlong to one event, then falling into another without much forethought or planning. Secrets and backstory reveal themselves to us in much the same way, without fanfare. Hausfrau is told in the third person narrative, so I felt as oddly disconnected from Anna as she did from the Swiss, and from the people close to her. In the end, this actually turned out to be beneficial, as the reader is permitted to view the events in her life with a sense of detachment. This detachment becomes necessary, because when the aforementioned tragedy strikes Anna's life, she begins to slowly circle the drain. Even so, I was not expecting the story's ending at all, I envisioned events taking a different path, and was stunned speechless on the last page. This novel has a great opening line, and an even better final paragraph - Essbaum knows how to begin and end a novel.
Although it started strong, ended with a bang and contained beautiful writing, I am unable to award 5 stars. Some novels have a certain something that make the characters and situations resonate with you long after reading. This novel lacks all that, at least for me. Still, I give Hausfrau a strong 4 stars, and recommend this novel for anyone who feels like they don't fit in, is lonely, and really for most any woman with an open mind.