A lonely woman is a dangerous woman…A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.
We all know the story of the bored housewife, her illicit affairs, the crumbling middle class family, the fallen woman who’s carefully stacked lies are doomed to come loose around her. But Jill Alexander Essbaum, with one foot in the 20th century and the other firmly planted in the present, evokes Virginia Wolfe, Sylvia Plath, and Kate Chopin. Hausfrau, Essbaum’s fiction debut, is classically modernist in it’s philosophical pondering and deeply flawed characters.
Hausfrau is the entangled story of an expat housewife living in Switzerland with her husband and three, rudy Swiss children. To say she is unhappy would be inaccurate. Anna is passive. She is an agreer, a woman quick to say “yes” because a “no” would reveal too much of herself. A self she may no longer know.
“What’s the difference between passivity and neutrality?”
“Passivity is deference. To be passive is to relinquish your will. Neutrality is nonpartisan. The Swiss are neutral, not passive. We do not choose a side. We are scales in perfect balance.”
“Not choosing. Is that still a choice?”
The novel flits between the past, present, Anna’s psychotherapy sessions that tug on the finely wrought veil she has created to keep her secrets, and shadowy admissions of adultery and love.
Essbaum shows her deft writing by keeping all the lies in the air. Doktor Messerli, perceptive therapist that she is, points us in the direction of the truth. She is a plumb-line of honesty.
As Anna stumbles in and out of faithfulness, Hausfrau teeters on the edge, if not plummets, into the erotic. Faith (also faithfulness) and desire cross swords on the page. It is in the half-light of her lust that Anna is revealed. It is this same light that casts us all into focus; our sins betray us.
Hausfrau is a warning; a marker to measure drift–once a line has been crossed, the seal broken, to err is habit.
Reading Hausfrau, I was reminded of Anais Nin’s introduction to Little Birds. “The sexual life,” she writes, “is usually enveloped in many layers, for all of us–poets, writers, artists. It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed.”
Hausfrau releases March 24, 2015 from Random House.
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