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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Sexy and insightful, this gorgeously written novel opens a window into one woman's desperate soul." -- People
Anna was a good wife, mostly.; For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning--"a modern-day Anna Karenina tale."*
Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno--a banker--and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna can't easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it's difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum's debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
Praise for Hausfrau
"Elegant, erotic . . . There is much to admire in Essbaum's intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel, including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present." -- Chicago Tribune
"For a first novelist, Essbaum is extraordinary because she is a poet. Her language is meticulous and resonant and daring." --NPR's Weekend Edition
"We're in literary territory as familiar as Anna's name, but Essbaum makes it fresh with sharp prose and psychological insight." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"A powerful, lyrical novel . . . Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary and a poet's fascination with language." -- The Huffington Post
"[ Hausfrau ;feels more contemporary, subjective, and just plain funny than classical bourgeois ennui. Imagine Tom Perrotta's American nowheresvilles swapped out for a tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German grammar and European hypocrisy." -- New York
"Brain-surgically constructed to fascinate you, entertain you, and then make you question what a life lived with meaning looks like--all with a sense of poetic discipline and introspection." -- Los Angeles Magazine
"[ Hausfrau ] is masterly as it moves toward its own inescapable ending." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
" Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey ." -- Sunday Express (U.K.)
* Glamour (U.K.)
Author Notes
Jill Alexander Essbaum was born in 1971 in Bay City, Texas. She is a poet, writer, and professor. Her most recent collections are the full-length manuscripts Harlot (No Tell Motel, 2007) and Necropolis (neoNuma Arts, 2008). Essbaum's poetry features puns, wordplay and dark humor, often mixed with religious and erotic imagery. She currently teaches at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center in the Masters of Creative Writing Graduate Program. Essbaum's debut novel, Hausfrau was published March 2015 and made The New York Times High Profile Title's List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Over a century after the publication of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, poet Essbaum proves in her debut novel that there is still plenty of psychic territory to cover in the story of "a good wife, mostly." But now, more than ever, it is clear that the conflict between the protagonist's desires and her "tightly circumscribed" world is her own doing, and not a result of social limitations. Anna Benz is an American expatriate and mother of three, married to Bruno, a Swiss banker. In her nine years of living in a tidy suburb of Zurich, Anna (whose name is a Tolstoy nod) has never gotten a driver's license, befriended other mothers, or learned Swiss German, the form of German spoken in Switzerland. Essbaum's story opens as Anna attempts to break through her ennui and engage with the world. She starts a course of Jungian analysis with the inimitable Doktor Messerli and finally enrolls in language classes. Still, she's drawn into a number of extramarital affairs that skirt the line between passion and passivity. In Essbaum's capable hands, Anna invites the reader's empathy rather than scorn. The realism of Anna's dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel are marvels of the form, and Essbaum chooses her words carefully. When her teacher lectures her on verb tenses, Anna wonders, "But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect?" This novel is masterly as it moves toward its own inescapable ending, and Anna is likely to provoke strong feelings in readers well after the final page. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As an American expat in Switzerland, Anna Benz feels lost. Her husband, a successful Swiss banker, is supportive but distant, and her grasp of the language is such that she has few friends beyond her three children and her helpful mother-in-law. Bored and lonely, Anna slips into a string of affairs, first falling in love with a professor visiting from the States, then dulling the pain of his abrupt departure with successive liaisons. German-language class, new friendships, and a Jungian analyst do little to help. Caught in a struggle to find herself and her place before the truth of her dalliances comes to light, Anna is already spiraling out of control when tragedy pushes her over the edge, where she will face the very base reality of the sum of her decisions. Isolated and tormented, Anna shares more than her name with that classic adulteress, Anna Karenina, but Essbaum has given a deft, modern facelift to the timeless story of a troubled marriage and tragic love in this seductive first novel.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANNA BENZ, the heroine of Jill Alexander Essbaum's frequently engrossing first novel, is a very bad girl indeed: indiscriminate in her philandering, highly specialized in secrets and lies and deeply invested in her own misery Worst of all, she can't even come clean to her shrink. "When will you trust me enough to tell me everything?" wonders her exasperated psychiatrist, Frau Doktor Messerli. An expat living with her Swiss banker husband and young children in a Zurich suburb, Anna has been in Switzerland for almost a decade, but she hasn't learned the language, made friends or opened a bank account in her own name. She's not sure what her husband does at work. She can't "imagine what looking beyond the tightly circumscribed world in which she lived might entail." Victor, her oldest son, is "standoffish" and mistrustful. Charles, the younger, is warm and empathic, his mother's obvious favorite. There is also a third child, an infant daughter. Anna's mother-in-law, Ursula, cares for them while Anna goes to the city to see Dr. Messerli, take a German language course and drown her sorrows in sex. These trysts confer momentary redemption via bodice-ripper prose (witness the "ruddy, florid bud of his erection," Anna "pining to be hungered for"), but she doesn't get much of a reprieve from her suffering, which is repetitive and one-note. She is a caged woman: dependent, hopeless and, as foreshadowed by frequent allusions to the efficient Swiss trains - which only run late "when someone jumps in front of one" - doomed. "Hausfrau" is obviously something of a "Madame Bovary"/"Anna Karenina" mash-up featuring the expected secrets and lies, faithlessness and despair, the untimely end, the inability to find relief from miseiy even in death. Tolstoy, however, balances Anna's perspective with the earnest sweat of Levin, the comical self-involvement of Vronsky and the spiritual seeking of Kitty Tolstoy's Anna is, to borrow a metaphor from "Hausfrau," the hub of a vast and fascinating wheel. In "Hausfrau," only the pitiful hub remains. Essbaum simply tells us over and over that Anna is bored, desolate, trapped, ambivalent, lonely and sad. (We know, we know.) The novel offers the distance and remove of Tolstoy's omniscient narration, but lacks its scope; it gives us Flaubert's insularity but without the compelling intimacy Like her predecessors, Anna Benz serves as a morality tale: Passivity and happiness are contraindicative. To be happy one must choose happiness, walk toward it, work to inhabit it, fake it till one makes it. And to be a successful patient of psychotherapy, one must commit to complete honesty. Withholding renders the whole enterprise a fantastic waste of time. Still, the sessions with Dr. Messerli are gripping forays into philosophical territory. In Anna's sophisticated questions there is a spark of possibility, of hope for her: "Is there a difference between shame and guilt?" "What's the difference between a need and a want?" "What's the difference between passivity and neutrality?" We learn these conversations are circling around a secret too big to be uttered, but at least she's talking. In the language class, Anna finds new friends, a new lover and many questionable linguistic allegories. In German, the passive voice is constructed with the verb "to become." "A paradoxical shift toward limp surrender," Anna thinks. "Whatever it is, you do not do it. It is done to you." "HAUSFRAU" IS A NOVEL of abiding, almost religious unhappiness. There is little air in Anna's sadness, precious little wit or grit or grace. Her miseiy is blunt and static, unyielding as a mountain. Essbaum's stylized formality and penchant for stating the obvious don't help matters. Anna grew "less decent every passing day" Anna was "frequently saddened by flux." Birthdays "dejected her." She was "pensive." She was "lonely and remote everywhere she went." Her parents, conveniently enough, died in a car crash when she was barely out of her teens, and she has no meaningful connections to speak of back home. But "Hausfrau" is not interested in the action of how a person becomes detached and amoral and so very, very lost. Nor is it interested in the action of how a person becomes happy and healthy; it is, instead, something like a still life color-study of Anna's sorrow. She is blue. She is dark blue. She is light blue. She is sky blue. She is navy She is slate. She possesses "a languor that dragged and jaded." She is "left with the reins of ennui, slack in her hand." (Are the reins of ennui ever taut?) There is "a metastasized wistfulness that, if she dwelt too long on it, devoured Anna with despair." The novel finally comes alive in its final third, with an act of wrenching psychic cruelty so outrageous we are jostled into urgent fear for Anna, her children, her soul. Such plot twists are the stuff of melodrama, and melodrama is by nature manipulative, and manipulation grows tiresome. But it works. Must Anna be punished for her adulteiy and her faithlessness and her incredible lies and that spectacular act of cruelty? Yes, of course she must be punished. And oh, is she punished. She is punished so severely, and in exactly the worst way possible, that at last her story begins to matter. These pages are harrowing and immediate, and hurtling toward its end the novel turns enthralling. "Abored woman is adangerous woman," Dr. Messerli tells Anna. It's a profound warning. "And?" Anna replies. One has to love this brand of refusal: She does not care to save herself. It's a perverse and refreshing nihilism. One can't help wondering, though, how a few days with Flaubert's Emma and Tolstoy's Anna might have shifted or deepened her thinking. ELISA ALBERT is the author, most recently, of "After Birth."
Kirkus Review
Between caring for three children, visiting a Jungian analyst and taking a German class, Anna wouldn't seem to have much time for extramarital liaisons, but like her namesake, Madame Karenina, she manages. Anna, who's American, has lived near Zurich with her Swiss banker husband, Bruno, for nine years yet still can't speak the language. She gets by in elementary German but is barely competent at Schwiizerdutsch, the local variant that "leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape." She doesn't have a job or a bank account; her parents are dead; and she has only one friend, another expatriate she doesn't even like very well. Her husband is cold and distant, her mother-in-law "was usually never blatantly unkind." That double negative is vintage Anna, who parses her feelings into ever finer distinctions. A few years ago, she drifted into an affair with another American, who went home without knowing he'd fathered her third child. Now she's studying German, which her analyst suggested as a way to become more connected to the world, though Doktor Messerli surely didn't mean she should jump into bed with a Scotsman she met in class. "Anna loved and didn't love sex. Anna needed and didn't need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted." As Anna floats through her life and this novel, taking endless train rides and insomniac walks, the story is interrupted by philosophical conversations with her shrink: "What's the difference between passivity and neutrality?" is a typical gambit. There's plenty of tensionwill Anna get caught?but it's hard to be invested in the life of a woman who doesn't care much about it herself. A smart book that entertains page by page but doesn't add up to anything larger. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
[DEBUT]Novels about affectless housewives risking all to indulge in the edgy pleasures of extramarital sex are hardly uncommon, but Anna's story is different, if only for the author's portraiture skills and escalated writing style. What else stands out in this sometimes chilling first novel by award-winning poet Essbaum: the extent of Anna's anomie and will to powerlessness. Having met and married Bruno, a coolly competent Swiss banker who takes her home to Zurich, where they now live with their three children, Anna sleepwalks through life until she's riven by an affair with a visiting MIT professor. Anna's easy fall into sex with strangers and passive acceptance of her husband's casual disregard are traced briefly and unsatisfactorily to a solitary childhood, and though the sex scenes are forceful, this is not a novel about sex but one that uses sex as a means of displaying and studying character. Anna's intense, inconclusive reflections on her behavior, sometimes woven into her study of German grammar, are the most interesting thing about her. Verdict A sharp and exceptionally well-written exploration of one woman's crisis of self that will leave readers unsettled-and perhaps a few unconvinced. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Anna was a good wife, mostly. It was mid-afternoon, and the train she rode first wrenched then eased around a bend in the track before it pulled into Bahnhof Dietlikon at thirty-four past the hour, as ever. It's not just an adage, it's an absolute fact: Swiss trains run on time. The S8 originated in Pfäffikon, a small town thirty kilometers away. From Pfäffikon, its route sliced upward along the shores of the Zürichsee, through Horgen on the lake's west bank, through Thalwil, through Kilchberg. Tiny towns in which tiny lives were led. From Pfäffikon, the train made sixteen stops before it reached Dietlikon, the tiny town in which Anna's own tiny life was led. Thus the ordinary fact of a train schedule modulated Anna's daily plans. Dietlikon's bus didn't run into the city. Taxicabs were expensive and impractical. And while the Benz family owned a car, Anna didn't drive. She did not have a license. So her world was tightly circumscribed by the comings and goings of locomotives, by the willingness of Bruno, Anna's husband, or Ursula, Bruno's mother, to drive her places unreachable by bus, and by the engine of her own legs and what distance they could carry her, which was rarely as far as she'd have liked to go. But Swiss trains really do run on time and Anna managed with minimal hassle. And she liked riding the trains; she found a lulling comfort in the way they rocked side to side as they moved forward. Edith Hammer, another expatriate, once told Anna that there was only one reason the Swiss trains ever ran late. "When someone jumps in front of one." Frau Doktor Messerli asked Anna if she had ever considered or attempted suicide. "Yes," Anna admitted to the first question. And to the second, "Define 'attempt.' " Doktor Messerli was blond, small-bodied, and of an ambiguous but late middle age. She saw clients in an office on Trittligasse, a cobbled, lightly trafficked street just west of Zürich's art museum. She'd studied medical psychiatry in America but had received her analytic training at the Jung Institute in Küsnacht, a Zürich municipality not less than seven kilometers away. Swiss by birth, Doktor Messerli nonetheless spoke an impeccable, if heavily accented, English. Her w's masqueraded as v's and her vowels were as open and elongated as parabolic arches: Vhat dooo yooo sink, Anna? she'd often ask (usually when Anna was least likely to give an honest answer). There was a television commercial that promoted a well-known language school. In the ad, a novice naval radio operator is shown to his post by his commanding officer. Seconds into his watch the receiver pings. "Mayday! Mayday!" a markedly American voice grates through the speaker. "Can you hear us? We are sinking! We are sinking!" The operator pauses then leans toward his transmitter and replies, quite graciously, "Dis is dee Germ-ahn Coast Guard." And then: "Vhat are yooo sinking about?" Anna would invariably shrug a sluggard's shrug and speak the only words that seemed worth speaking. "I don't know." Except, of course, Anna most always did. It was a drizzly afternoon. Swiss weather is mutable, though rarely extreme in Kanton Zürich, and typically not in September. It was September, for Anna's sons had already returned to school. From the station Anna walked slowly the culpable half kilometer up Dietlikon's center street, lingering over shop windows, biding small bits of time. All postcoital euphorics had evaporated, and she was left with the reins of ennui, slack in her hand. This wasn't a feeling she was new to. It was often like this, a languor that dragged and jaded. The optometrist's on-sale eyeglass display dulled her. She yawned at the Apotheke's pyramid of homeopathic remedies. The bin of discount dishtowels by the SPAR bored her nearly beyond repair. Boredom, like the trains, carried Anna through her days. Is that true? Anna thought. That can't be entirely true. It wasn't. An hour earlier Anna lay naked, wet and open atop a stranger's bed in an apartment in Zürich's Niederdorf district, four stories above the old town's wending alleys and mortared stone streets upon which kiosks vended doner kebabs and bistros served communal pots of melted Emmental. What little shame I had before is gone, she thought. "Is there a difference between shame and guilt?" Anna asked. "Shame is psychic extortion," Doktor Messerli answered. "Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise." It was almost 3:00 p.m. when Anna reached her sons' school. Primarschule Dorf was positioned next to the town square between the library and a three-hundred-year-old house. A month earlier on the Swiss national holiday, the square was thick with citizens eating sausages and swaying like drunkards to the live music of a folk band under a sky made bright with fireworks. During army maneuvers, soldiers parked supply trucks in sloppy diagonals next to the square's central fountain, which on summer days would be filled with splashing, naked children whose mothers sat on nearby benches reading books and eating yogurt. Bruno had finished his reserve duty years earlier. All that was left of the experience was an assault rifle in the basement. As for Anna, she didn't care for paperbacks and when her sons wanted to swim she took them to the city pool. That day, the traffic in the square was thin. A trio of women chatted in front of the library. One pushed a stroller, another held a leash at the end of which panted a German shepherd, and a final one simply stood with empty hands. They were mothers waiting on their children and they were younger than Anna by a factor of ten years. They were milky and buoyant in places where Anna felt curdled and sunken. They wore upon their faces, Anna thought, a luminous ease of being, a relaxed comportment, a native glow. Anna rarely felt at ease inside her skin. I am tight-faced and thirty-seven years, Anna thought. I am the sum of all my twitches. One mother tossed her a wave and a genuine, if obligatory, smile. She'd met this stranger in her German class. But Anna--his cock's been in your mouth, she reminded herself. He's not really a stranger anymore. And he wasn't. He was Archie Sutherland, Scotsman, expatriate, and, like Anna, language student. Anna Benz, Language Student. It was Doktor Messerli who had encouraged her to take the German course (and, by a backspin of redoubtable irony, it was Bruno who'd insisted she see a psychotherapist: I've had enough of your fucking misery, Anna. Go fix yourself, is what he'd said to her). Doktor Messerli then handed Anna a schedule of classes and said, "It's time you steer yourself into a trajectory that will force you into participating more fully with the world around you." The Doktor's affected speech, while condescending, was correct. It was time. It was past time. By the end of that appointment and with some more pointed cajoling, Anna conceded and agreed to enroll in a beginner's German class at the Migros Klubschule, the very class she should have taken when, nine years prior, she arrived in Switzerland, tongue-tied, friendless, and already despairing of her lot. An hour earlier Archie had called to Anna from his kitchen: Would she take a coffee? A tea? Something to eat? Was there anything she needed? Anything? Anything at all? Anna dressed cautiously, as if thorns had been sewn into the seams of her clothes. From the street below, she heard the rising cries of children returning to school post-lunch and the voices of American sightseers who grumped about the pitch of the hill atop which Zürich's Grossmünster was built. The cathedral is a heavy building, medieval gray and inimitable, with two symmetric towers that rise flush against the church's façade and jut high above its vaulted roof like hare's ears at attention. Or cuckold's horns. "What's the difference between a need and a want?" "A want is desirable, though not essential. A need is something without which you cannot survive." The Doktor added, "If you cannot live without something, you won't." Anything at all? Like Doktor Messerli, Archie spoke a magnificently accented English intoned not by the shape-shifting consonants of High Alemannic, but by words that both roiled and wrenched open. Here an undulant r, there a queue of vowels rammed into one another like a smithy's bellows pressed hotly closed. Anna drew herself to men who spoke with accents. It was the lilt of Bruno's nonnative English that she let slide its thumb, its tongue into the waistband of her panties on their very first date (that, and the Williamsbirnen Schnaps, the pear tinctured eau-de-vie they drank themselves stupid with). In her youth Anna dreamed soft, damp dreams of the men she imagined she would one day love, men who would one day love her. She gave them proper names but indistinct, foreign faces: Michel, the French sculptor with long, clay-caked fingers; Dmitri, the verger of an Orthodox church whose skin smelled of camphor, of rockrose, of sandalwood resin and myrrh; Guillermo, her lover with matador hands. They were phantom men, girlhood ideations. But she mounted an entire international army of them. It was the Swiss one she married. If you cannot live without something, you won't. Despite Doktor Messerli's suggestion that she enroll in these classes, Anna did know an elementary level of German. She got around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it. For nine years, though, she'd managed with rudimentary competence. Anna had purchased stamps from the woman at the post office, consulted in semi-specifics with pediatricians and pharmacists, described the haircuts she desired to stylists, haggled prices at flea markets, made brief chitchat with neighbors, and indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of The Watchtower. Anna had also, though with less frequency, given directions to strangers, adapted recipes from cooking programs, taken notes when the chimney sweep detailed structural hazards of loose mortar joints and blocked flues, and extracted herself from citations when, upon the conductor's request, she could not produce her rail pass for validation. Excerpted from Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
