Another Elizabeth Buchan book: The good wife strikes back

January 23rd, 2008 | Books

Elizabeth Buchan has the ability to get into your head, if you are lucky enough to be the subject of her novel(s.) Maybe unlucky enough. Who knows where self-knowledge or self-revelation would take you.

In other words, she makes the stream of consciousness very believable. She captures the essence of the life of a woman of a certain age. In this case Fanny is in her 40s, as is her husband Will. Buchan gets to the heart of their marriage, and to the sense that we are unknown to each other (and maybe even to ourselves) because life changes even as we do.

Surprised by life.

Her titles capture me, before I read the first word.

Fanny has been a good wife, sublimating herself into her marriage and child (now newly left home), maybe more so than many women because her husband is a politician who makes it plain from the beginning that she is never to utter her real thoughts publicly (about politics mostly). Of course, this being a political year here in the States, it makes me wonder how many similar convos go on in the various households of those who are running for election.

Here are a few random quotes:

1 It is a truth universally acknowledged that one person’s happiness is frequently bought at the expense of another’s.

5 …having struggled through muffling intimacies of being a wife and a mother, I was asking: Which room was mine alone? Into which still, private room could I retreat?…I realized that I’d made the mistake, unlike Nora, [Ibsen's Dollhouse] of continuing to believe in miracles…

202… Only later did I understand that I was required to pick up other lives and carry them as well as my own.

303 It was here, in this house, that our marriage performed its trick of turning from an abstract bit of paper — the bit of paper that Caro [her dad's lover] had longed for — into the skin that clothed us both. Inside it, we lived and breathed, and smiled and wept, and drooped and flourished, sometimes all at the same time.

Have you read any of her books? If they are read with a British accent, I think an audio book would ‘take you there.’ I prefer to read the book, as I skip around, then skip back, then hop forward. Yiyiyi. I can’t wait for the end, necessarily. But once I’ve read it, I think I’d enjoy at least hearing part of it. It reminds me a bit of one of our exchange students. He was from Paris, and what he wanted most to do was watch episodes of TV. The shows were dubbed in France, but he wanted to hear what the real voices sounded like. When I read, I read in my own voice, not the accents of the characters, unless it is written in dialect.

Karin

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