This novel is also of a type. I don’t know if you’ve read Jenny Offil’s Dept of Speculation or Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday, but both deal with the collapse of both long-term relationships, but also the collapse of long-term relationships in the swift succession of a partner leaving. In Offil’s, it’s for an affair with a much younger woman, which leads the narrator to focus her energies going piece by piece through the relationship in pained and sometimes funny ways. I didn’t happen to like it very much, but a lot of people did. Shirley Barrett’s book deals with the way a cancer disgnosis and treatment derails her early 30s’ trajectory and how her fiance leaves her, leading her to take a job far in the Autralian bush.
Both of these books are kind of chasing what I think is the masterwork (at least recently — I imagine there’s lots I don’t know about), Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment which eschews any kind of humor and puts the rawness, the wounding, and the irruption of the narrator’s life on full display for an unrelenting 180 pages.
This book splits the difference. Our narrator has recently been left when she “doesn’t take it well” that IVF and other attempts for her to become pregnant eventually lead her to husband to leave her. This wound opens in the raw way, but she’s able to focus her destructive energy into closely watching and lightly stalking her neighbor, an unnamed and famous Hollywood actress, a kind of portrayal here that feels like an amalgamation of either several specific actress or archetypes.
The book follows this obsession, along with crumbling in other parts of her life — a messy predivorce, casually and then not so casually sleeping with a student in her (college) poetry class. There’s a raw and intense momentum in this book that builds in a satisfying way. It’s a very good 3 stars.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36553406-looker)
