MY HUSBAND

Ventura’s first novel explores love’s darker alleyways through the eyes of a 40-year-old Frenchwoman who's obsessed with her husband.

One Sunday, after becoming aware that her 15-year marriage may be about to implode, the unnamed narrator, a part-time teacher and English-French translator, relives the previous week. She defines each day by color and general mood; so Monday is blue, a day of beginnings, while quarrelsome Tuesday is black, and good luck Friday, green. But all revolve around the narrator’s excessive passion for her husband (referred to only as “my husband” as a declaration of possession). A modern Emma Bovary aiming her passionate energy toward her husband instead of a lover, she knows “I have to control myself” to avoid appearing “unseemly.” Insecure in her husband’s moneyed, bourgeois world, she relies on organization and rules. She teaches herself etiquette from a book. She fills notebooks with lists. Each day she notates both reasons she adores him—good looks, charisma, breeding, earning power—and a litany of his abuses: kissing her cheek instead of lips, holding her hand too briefly, choosing a clementine to describe her in a game with friends. She’s created rules her husband breaks without knowing they exist and doles out what she considers corresponding punishments that range from ignoring his calls to having meaningless sexual assignations. The reader sees the narrator’s husband only through her neurotic, nit-picking lens. Is he controlling and oblivious or devoted both to her and their two children (whom she finds distractions from the marriage)? Self-consciously erudite with her references to Phaedra and Duras, the narrator is also witty; a riff on how to translate “sweep me off my feet” into French is particularly charming. Beyond eccentric, she is easy to laugh at but also a discomforting object of condescending pity. And yes, there’s a somewhat contrived twist at the end that reading groups will love to discuss.

Writing about control as much as love, Ventura describes a marriage from hell that works, however oddly.