{"id":5555,"date":"2015-11-10T13:54:06","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T13:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=5555"},"modified":"2016-06-22T17:50:35","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T17:50:35","slug":"5555-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=5555","title":{"rendered":"The Man of the Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviews of<\/em>:\u00a0Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau<\/em><\/a>;\u00a0Rebecca Whitney, The Liar’s Chair<\/em><\/a>; and\u00a0Laura Lippman, After I’m Gone<\/em><\/a><\/h3>\n

Rebecca Whitney, writing in the Independent<\/a><\/em>\u00a0earlier this year, thoughtfully analyses the huge current appeal of domestic noir \u2013 our fascination with \u201cthe toxic marriage and its fall-out.\u201d Several successful novels have fed this fascination by constructing \u2018romance gone wrong\u2019 plots in which a woman marries an intelligent, charismatic, chisel-featured homme fatale who, by the third act, has turned out to be a dangerous psychopath, multiple murderer and\/or serial rapist. But what if the chosen partner is simply too dedicated to the role of the traditional husband \u2013 a man of business who is ambitious, overbearing and possessive?<\/p>\n

In some of the most interesting recent examples of domestic noir, we follow the stories of women whose fates lie in the hands of such men, their lives distorted by a domineering partner who expects absolute fidelity. In two of the novels reviewed here, the man of the family not only forbids dissent but bullies and humiliates his wife, betraying her trust and driving her to desperation: Jill Alexander Essbaum, in her haunting psychological study, Hausfrau<\/em>, conjures up a claustrophobic, repressive world in which a wife\u2019s extreme submissiveness makes her \u201cill with inaction, a person sitting passively in a dark cinema\u201d; Rebecca Whitney\u2019s The Liar\u2019s Chair<\/em> is a tense, well-constructed domestic thriller that centres on the disintegrating relationship of an apparently prosperous, successful couple. Laura Lippman creates a more complex version of the unequal marriage in her wonderful, nuanced family drama, After I\u2019m Gone<\/em>, in which the patriarch is a criminal version of the forceful businessman. Having has \u201cmade his own game\u201d, he will brook no challenge to the rules he plays by, and, when he absconds, the five women he leaves behind still lead lives dominated by the game he has created, in thrall to his myth and living in constant expectation that he will reach out or return to them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau,\u00a0<\/em>Random House\u00a0(January 2015)<\/h3>\n

\"Essbaum_Hausfrau\"<\/a>Hausfrau<\/em> is a bleak, darkly compelling novel, beautifully written, sensual, subtle, often witty and, at times, utterly harrowing. The story of Anna Benz, a bored, adulterous housewife, has been seen as a modern version of Madame Bovary<\/em> or Anna Karenina<\/em>; readers of twentieth-century crime fiction might also be reminded of the thwarted, ineffectual noir victim-protagonists of James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and David Goodis \u2013 isolated, despondent, passive characters who hopelessly acquiesce in a fate dictated both by circumstance and by their own self-destructiveness. In interview<\/a> Essbaum says of Anna, \u201cShe\u2019s actually not living her life at all. She\u2019s going through her life\u2019s motions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anna is an American married to Bruno, a mid-level manager in Credit Suisse. She has lived for nearly a decade in a small town near Zurich, during which time she has acquired almost none of the requisites of an independent existence. She has no driver\u2019s licence or bank account, no role in handling the family\u2019s finances, little fluency in the language. As she realizes in conversations with her Jungian analyst, her passivity is a symptom of her complicity: \u201cAllowing Bruno to make decisions on her behalf absolved her of responsibility\u2026 She rode a bus that someone else drove. And Bruno liked driving it.” Though he can be terrifying when he goes \u201cbeyond anger\u201d, Bruno is not habitually violent. But he is gruff and remote, and Anna has \u201clearned to tiptoe and step slowly\u201d, fearful of arousing his ire by intruding on his silences.<\/p>\n

As a counterpoint to her domestic submissiveness, her affairs get progressively more dangerous \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m cheating on the man I\u2019m cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day<\/em>.\u201d She realises that she is spinning out of control: \u201cTake one lover, you may as well take twenty, Anna thought. They\u2019re like salty snacks. You can\u2019t stop at one.<\/em>\u201d As in 1940s noir melodramas (Mildred Pierce<\/em>, for example), there are harsh punishments awaiting those guilty of transgression and excess. Like Anna\u2019s meetings with her therapist, the language classes she takes are used throughout to provide uncomfortably insightful commentaries on the course she is pursuing. Lecturing on the conditional, her German teacher says, \u201c\u2019Zum Beispiel, if I am sick tomorrow, then I will not go to school\u2019… Anna found little relief in this. If I am caught . . . then I am fucked.\u201d Several readers of Hausfrau<\/em> have expressed their frustration \u2013 even their incredulity \u2013 at Anna\u2019s combination of intelligence with an almost total inability to escape the if-then logic of the conditional \u2013 to act to save herself. But it is in part the remorselessness of Essbaum\u2019s plotting that is so hypnotically compelling. It\u2019s a novel that \u2013 at least for this reader \u2013 lingers disturbingly in one\u2019s mind for a very long time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rebecca Whitney, The Liar\u2019s Chair,\u00a0<\/em>Mantle\u00a0(March 2015)<\/h3>\n

\"Whitney_LiarsChair\"<\/a>Like Hausfrau<\/em>, The Liar\u2019s Chair<\/em> centres on an adulterous wife and her fraught, toxic relationship with a repressive husband. Rachel Teller habitually submits to the demands of David, her overwhelmingly domineering partner. \u201cYou\u2019re all mine,\u201d he tells her, and he will go to some lengths to ensure his continued possession of her: \u201cHe gave me boundaries and curfews, rules for my friendships\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The mechanisms of control begin to crumble, however, when Rachel takes a lover and, after a drunken assignation, hits a man with her car, hiding the body in panic and submitting to David when he insists that they cover up the accident. Rachel accedes to his demands, but with guilt, distrust and anger seething under the surface she begins to fear the worst: \u201cIf he can\u2019t bring me into line there is nowhere I can disappear to that will be far enough away. Before, the penalties were only ever emotional, but it feels like something in me has broken and the old ways of settling things will no longer work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitney skillfully combines domestic melodrama with the fast-paced world of the thriller, holding readers\u2019 attention with a taut, economical narrative. As the central relationship breaks down completely, the plot developments become more gripping, the psychological conflicts darker and increasingly violent. More or less everyone in The Liar\u2019s Chair<\/em> behaves very badly. Their efforts to solve problems are spectacularly misjudged; they are socially dysfunctional and morally despicable. We are repelled, but at the same time anxious to know what happens to them. Our fascination is a tribute to the disturbing acuity of Whitney\u2019s twisted psychological portraits.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Laura Lippman, After I\u2019m Gone,\u00a0<\/em>William Morrow (February 2014)<\/h3>\n

\"Lippman_AfterImGone\"<\/a>In After I\u2019m Gone<\/em>, the man of the house is conspicuous by his absence. The novel originated in a true story: Felix, head of the Brewer family, is loosely based on Julius Salsbury, who ran a gambling operation in 1970s Baltimore and then, convicted of mail fraud, absconded rather than serve a prison sentence. In transforming these events into a novel, Laura Lippman places Felix offstage, brilliantly constructing her narrative around the women he deserted. The family saga that unfolds is, like all of Lippman\u2019s fiction, subtle, beautifully written and sharply observed, compelling our attention throughout.<\/p>\n

After Felix takes flight, his wife, his mistress and his three daughters are left struggling to define their lives without the forceful presence of a man whose dominance and drive had seemed irresistible \u2013 the man who \u201cwanted to be rich rich, as he called it, no-doubt-about-it rich. Stinking rich. Screw-the-world rich.\u201d His wife, Bambi, tough in her own way, had reconciled herself to his view of life and his infidelities, listening with patient scepticism to his excuses (\u201c\u2019Everything I do, I do for you.\u2019 She had thought it was quite the stupidest thing she had ever heard.\u201d). What is far less forgivable, in her view, is his cowardice in abandoning his family, but she nevertheless finds herself unable to move forward without reference to Felix. Her daughters, though less disabled by long-established habits of submission, also live under the burden of their father\u2019s myth, which only grows more potent in his decades of absence, even after the \u201cterrible confidences\u201d imparted by their mother.<\/p>\n

The mysteries surrounding Felix\u2019s disappearance deepen when, ten years after his departure, the \u2018other woman\u2019, Julie, goes missing. It is assumed that she has gone to join Felix. But fifteen years later, when her body is discovered in Leakin Park, an investigator \u2013 a retired cop \u2013 begins to unravel the confusions, misconceptions and guilty secrets that Felix left behind. Lippman brings into play her enormous skills in seamlessly weaving together detective fiction and domestic melodrama. The investigative process ultimately brings into satisfying focus the role of Felix and his deeply flawed relationships. Most importantly, we\u2019re brought to understand the characters of the women who found themselves unable to escape his influence, even when they were, like Bambi\u2019s mother, \u201conto Felix\u201d, and realized that they should never have been willing \u201cto buy what he was selling\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviews of:\u00a0Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau;\u00a0Rebecca Whitney, The Liar’s Chair; and\u00a0Laura Lippman, After I’m Gone Rebecca Whitney, writing in the Independent\u00a0earlier<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Man of the Family<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":5813,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5555"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5555"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5635,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5555\/revisions\/5635"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}