As summer moves into its most languorous days, it’s a perfect time to dive into books about love, obsession and madness.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more unhealthy example of obsession than that of the narrator in Maud Ventura’s MY HUSBAND (HarperVia, 260 pp., $28.99), a cautionary tale about marital claustrophobia translated from the French by Emma Ramadan.
“I think of my husband all the time; I wish I could text him all day,” says the woman, a beautiful mother of two who lives in an elegant house in the Parisian suburbs. But she restrains herself. “I know I have to control myself in order to love.”
She describes how she compulsively analyzes the nuances of her husband’s behavior — Did he respond promptly to her last message? Why did he cruelly leave her out of the anecdote he told at the dinner party? — and the strange lengths to which she goes to keep track of them. But even she recognizes that her constant surveillance of and tiny acts of retaliation against this seemingly blameless man aren’t without consequences.
“With the exception of my unexplained itching and my all-consuming passion for my husband,” she says, “my life is perfectly normal.” (Unreliable narrator alert!)
The book takes its time, demanding the reader’s forbearance as it lays out the minutiae of the couple’s domestic arrangements. But we start to wonder about the husband (who, like the narrator, is never named). Maybe he isn’t as perfect as he seems. Ventura gradually ratchets up the tension, as if she’s stretching a rubber band. What will make it snap?
On the surface, Margo, one of the main characters in Laura Sims’s unnerving HOW CAN I HELP YOU (Putnam, 240 pp., $27), is a cheerful librarian known for her ready smile and her willingness to perform even the most mundane task. But it’s a facade she can maintain for only so long, because she has a secret: In her previous job, she was a nurse whose hobby was murdering her patients.
Margo has an almost physical yearning for the exquisite thrill of presiding over her victims’ final moments. Watching her lose her composure by threatening library patrons is great fun. But what really sets this novel spinning is the arrival of the new reference librarian, Patricia, a failed novelist who soon suspects that Margo is hiding something — and who believes she has found in her co-worker the subject of her next book.
It would be a mistake to think of Patricia as some sort of avenging angel, eager to turn Margo in. She’s more fascinated than censorious. As it happens, she shares Margo’s admiration for Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” sympathizing with its off-kilter characters and quietly deranged heroine. “She had certainly done monstrous things — but she was human, too,” Patricia thinks.
“How Can I Help You” reads like a homage to Jackson’s work — and, in its portrait of Patricia, to Jackson herself. Sims’s great achievement is to present the two main characters almost as sides of the same coin, colluding in a psychological cat-and-mouse game that only one can win.
THE POSSIBILITIES (Random House, 285 pp., $27) is not a conventional sci-fi thriller, although it features elements of one — multiple universes existing simultaneously; discussions of quantum mechanics; the sense that truth is a slippery thing. The author, Yael Goldstein-Love, has tucked something truly scary inside that structure: a story about the terror, exhilaration and exhaustion of being a new mother, and about what it would feel like to lose a child.
When the book begins, Jack, the son of Hannah Bennett and her husband, Adam, is a happy, bouncy, much-loved 8-month-old. But he nearly died at birth. Hannah, a novelist, is still haunted by the memory of the tiny limp arm and blue lifeless lips she thinks she saw that day.
But is that image a nightmare conjured by her anxiety? Or did Jack in fact die, meaning that his existence is a grief-fueled delusion? The two possibilities dance before us, dueling for supremacy.
When Jack goes missing — one moment he’s in his crib, the next he’s not — Hannah’s search for him is clouded by the prospect that maybe she has indeed gone mad with anguish. Certainly, no one else seems to remember her son, except for the women in her new mothers’ support group. “You know what I’m saying is true,” her therapist says. “You’re searching for a child who doesn’t exist.”
This beautiful, exciting book is also a head-spinning, sometimes confusing trip. It helps to pay attention to the discussion of Hannah’s own mother, a brilliant physicist who became mentally ill and disappeared from her daughter’s life. But the novel is at its best when it portrays Hannah’s love for Jack.
“All I wanted was to be here, with him,” she says. “And to love him in the most unextraordinary way, which was to say with an immensity that couldn’t be contained by the laws of logic, morality or nature.”
