MY PHANTOM HUSBAND

My Phantom Husband ($19.95; May; 160 pp.; 1-56584-538-2): In this compact second novel by the popular author of Pig Tales (1997), an unnamed woman experiences a vivid roller-coaster barrage of emotions and fantasies after her perfectly conventional husband goes out on an errand, and never returns. Darrieussecq expands this simple premise skillfully, as the woman’s worried self-questioning evokes conflicting images of invasion, suffocation, burial, vampirism, and self-destruction. Little happens, but little needs to, in a memorable dramatization of the unknowability of those closest to us and, hence, of ourselves.