Novel About My Wife

Compelling, well-written, and achingly sad. (I'm currently reading Nabokov's Timofey Pnin as a comic antidote to pull me out of the funk after reading this.) Written from the perspective of a man whose wife has died, you slowly learn the details leading to her death. Makes me wonder about the solidity of our relationships, and how well we know people in our lives. I want to read more by Perkins, but my public libraries carry hardly any of her books...

The loose ends in this book are not all gathered up. We are left wondering about what drove Ann, the wife. The London scene as background is a materialistic, maddening round of people in a rush and on the make, which I find unattractive as a setting. Ann's delusions mount, yet her gormless husband is too thick to act as we would expect him to. No one in the book seems intuitively bright.
The tourist world of Fiji is an apt location for the sinister recollections Ann has in a sequence of experiences that prefigure the story.

This was a rather strange book. First of all, there are no chapters. About the only breaks are excerpts from a diary about a trip to Fiji.

Secondly, it's never clear if this diary is by Anne (the wife) or by Tom (the husband). Fiji is where they got married, on the spur of the moment while Tom was supposed to be working on a script for an Australian director, Haliburton. The bulk of the book is by Tom, written after Anne died. He tells the story of their last year together while Anne was pregnant. While it is obvious Anne died until the very end the cause of her death is not apparent.

Thirdly, even when you know the cause of her death (by suicide) it is not clear what her exact impetus was. It seems to be tied to Haliburton because he show more knew of her (or maybe knew her) when Anne was growing up in Sydney. Or maybe Anne is just mentally ill (I don't mean to minimize mental illness by that comment just indicate that the cause of suicide often is mental illness) because she sees insects and a dangerous man when no-one else does. Possibly she was suffering from post-partum depression or acid flashbacks. There is just no neat explanation of her death. Maybe that was the point but if so, I think it could have been handled better.

I don't think that Emily Perkins was particularly convincing writing as a man. Unlike Clara Callan which was written by Richard Wright, I kept finding that Tom's actions seemed bizarre. He just stands beside a gate while a gang of boys swarm over it and let them mug him. I don't know of many men who wouldn't either take off or fight back in that situation. He agonizes about not having any money and then goes on a holiday to Cornwall and commits a number of other frivolous expenses. I just never really believed Tom and since virtually all of the book is in his voice that leaves a big hole. show less

Een duistere, suggestieve en onweerstaanbare roman over de behoefte aan ontsnapping en de gevaren van het vergeten. Een overpeinzing over liefde en verlies.

Spooky and dark and impending doom the entire time.
Tom Stone is madly in love with his wife Ann. They have recently bought a house in up and coming Hackney, London even though Tom is a failing screenwriter, and Ann has a part time job in a hospital in London. However, they need more space as Ann is soon to be having their first child.
I loved that that the book is told from Tom's perspective (and that the book is written by the talented Emily Perkins) and from the opening page, we know that Ann is dead.
However, it is all a little murky -- sort of like the entire novel is written with an opaque cloth around it. Much is left unsaid and unexplained.
I found the prose to be well-written, tight and well developed character study of a couple's show more life which is slowly falling apart. show less

Emily Perkins' Novel About My Wife is summed up in its title. Written from Tom’s perspective, this is a good study of a relationship and grief. From the first sentence invoking all of Tom's love it is clear that Ann is dead, with the story charting their life together.

The story is set, we find out at the end, only a few months after Ann’s death therefore the story is told through the lens of Tom’s grief and what has been lost, rather than from an appreciation of what he was lucky to have had. This is understandable, but it felt overwhelmingly sad, with the only bright spot being Arlo’s birth. As we know up front that Ann dies there is also a pervading sense of doom, and when mental illness begins to play a role in the story this show more becomes quite a dark book. This is despite Tom and Ann supposedly having a wonderful relationship, but there was little demonstrating this, just Tom’s repeated insistence. Perhaps this was Tom choosing to remember his marriage that way.

Neither Tom nor Ann are particularly sympathetic characters, I think Ann could have been but we only get Tom’s perspective of her. As Tom’s the narrator for the whole book, I found it very difficult to invest in either character or their relationship, and I couldn’t relate to many of their experiences.

There are also a number of major questions left answered about Ann - what exactly happened to her before she left Australia, what happened in Fiji, and whether she was mentally unwell and if so, to what degree. I would have liked these questions resolved more clearly.

I finished Novel About My Wife because some answers were being provided, and I was curious to find out exactly what happened to Ann. But I found this an easy book to put down and was never fully engaged with the story. show less

I have had the opportunity to reread this novel and am pleased I have. It needs to be read at a pace. The author cleverly gets inside the head of Tom who is grieving for his wife Ann, who has died suddenly , not long after the birth of their child. There is a slightly manic air to their relationshipand red herrings are placed along the way as we try to anticipate the course of her death.