My Husband
by Maud Ventura
translated by Emma Ramadan
My top books of recent memory—Pachinko; House of Mirth—end up with oblique reviews where I dance around the details of the novel in an effort to convince my hypothetical reader to go in fresh, to experience my joy first-hand. This is not particularly useful to me a few years down the road. So be warned, now, that I’m not going to be cagey about the plot of My Husband: this review is mostly for me to look at in five years so I can remember why, exactly, I smiled at the word “clementine” so often.
You’ve been warned.
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* Abandon all plot mystery, ye who enter here *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
Gone Girl this is not. It’s better, in that you’re not reading a mystery or a twystery (what I assume the genre of the Shamylanian “big twist” is called. I find it challenging not to brace for or search out breadcrumbs to a plot-shifting reveal if I know one is projected [see, also: Knights of the Old Republic]) but the epilogue will, in fact, take what you know about the prior 200+ pages and dump them over your head. After a complete and wonderful novel where you spend so much time so close to the narrator–knowing she believes her own reality, knowing she’s this representative figure for the over-the-top essence of what society claims drives women: too sensitive; seeing slights in every word or omission by her husband–to have the axis of the world judder and shift in a scant six pages is just a wonder.
Before the gasp moment, the route is beautiful; it has to be, because that’s the entirety of the book, in theory, until it isn’t. But the slow drift into the narrator’s psychosis is such an easy path–she’s convincing because her observations and connections, which seem quite frankly insane, have a fabulous internal consistency:
When the check comes, my husband pays the bill. It’s a minor detail perhaps, but this small act of care transforms our lunch into a gallant rendezvous. Then I notice that he leaves a frankly excessive tip. The slightly too-familiar tone with the waitress, the lasagna, the large tip: Has my husband fallen in love with another woman? Since it can’t be the waitress, who is certainly not wife material, who is this other rival that I have to fear? Is it the euphoria of budding love that’s making him spend carelessly and change his habits? There are, of course, other possible explanations for the shifts I’ve noticed in his behavior: maybe he’s just happy to be eating lunch with me (the best-case scenario), relieved to have his file (probably true), or pleased by the mild weather this afternoon (it is nice out). But something has changed.
The lasagna scene cemented my posture of “Well, she’s certainly jumping at shadows.” However, nothing will come close to the early moment in the book where our narrator is at a small dinner party–it is still before her true internality has been reveled, so experiencing her interpersonal uncertainity and self-castigation over offering compliments (“In bourgeois milieus, people rarely compliment each other.”) might shunt us off into a class-and-standing novel, where the crux is an Eliza attempting to fit in with a My Fair Lady crowd. At the conclusion of one of the parlor games, the possibility that her perspective is accurate or even relatable has gone out of the window:
After dinner, as we are leaning out the windows amid cigarette smoke and the aroma of red wine, we decide to prolong the night with a game. Each player is assigned a fruit that they then have to make their team guess.
My husband chooses the clementine for me. I try not to reveal just how wounded I am. Is he trying to tease me or get a rise out of me? I ask him about it in a lighthearted tone, without insisting. He answers that he doesn’t know why he chose this particular fruit, but that it suits me well. And then my husband stands up to serve himself more wine. Is it a coincidence, or is he avoiding confrontation?
[two or three more delightful paragraphs]
So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.
Then, for the remainder of the week–the book starts on a Sunday and then jumps back six days–any time something rattles our narrator, her status as clementine leaps out. Each and every time is an inexplicable delight.
I’m much too aggrieved by the clementine incident.
How could he have reduced his own wife to the rank of a vulgar clementine?
I hate being a clementine, but I also wouldn’t have appreciated being a pear, a banana, or a grape.
I grabbed the [scarf] with the orange pattern (ever since my husband turned me into a clementine, I’ve solemnly sworn never to wear clothing of this color again), when I thought I’d grabbed the green one.
I’m still angry about the clementine, but I am mature enough to set my anger aside when necessary.
On the way home, I cry about the clementine.
[thirty pages later]
As evidenced by the fact that he still hasn’t apologized for turning me into a clementine.
[nearly 80 pages sans clementine]
When my husband doesn’t take my hand, when he turns me into a clementine, when he doesn’t ask me about my day, when he closes the shutters and draws the curtains before going to bed, when he interrupts me, when he forgets the name of a coworker I tell him about often, when he doesn’t seem particularly eager to see me again, when he lets go of my hand in the street, when he doesn’t answer one of my calls, when I catch him with his eyes open during a kiss: those moments set my marriage to a sad soundtrack.
And yes, I had to check–it’s still a clementine in the original French.
Our narrator is wild, sure, but there’s so much core to her–everything: her job; her background; her desires; her observations; her intuitions; fits together:
This scene that I visualize effortlessly (I’ve imagined it so many times) unexpectedly puts me at ease. For all this time I haven’t been crazy after all. My anxiety was founded, my fear legitimate all along. I had every reason in the world to be worried: my husband really did intend to leave me.
She’s wrong, of course: her husband isn’t preparing to leave her, but this is so well observed to how anxiety works—one is so nervous about a negative event that when it finally seems like it might happen, it is a sort of twisted relief. This does presage the truth, which is contained in the epilogue–her anxiety truly was founded. Yes, that’s right—we’re treated to our narrator slowly, slowly sounding and behaving more and more erratically, and by the end there’s no chance it’s anything but in her head: she’s jumping at clementines and lasagna, she’s the one graphically having extramarital sexual encounters, she’s purposefully hiding her husbands things to give her the chance to see him during the day. Of course—but not obviously—the “reveal” which isn’t really a “reveal” because the book would stand—albeit differently—just as well without the “twist” (and you can’t say that for most “twist” novels), is that the husband is doing all these things to her intentionally.
Cue the gasp. And the clicking together of the grand metaphor of how society gaslights and abuses women with mutually exclusive demands and forever-twisting foundations for their own self-worth. However. However.
At the very opening, you might have noticed that the narrator explicitly states, “My husband has no name; he is my husband, he belongs to me.” And she stands by that. He is never not mon mari, my husband.
The final two sentences in the epilogue–which is from the husband’s perspective—are “She’s Ariane. She’s my wife.” At that point reading a name will smash you in the face like a hammer–you’re still coming to grips with the fact that she’s not completely mad but is actively being tormented by her husband. There is a glimmer, a glimmer that, in fact, his nonsense justification for what he does—“I fuel her passion for the good of our family. I know her by heart: if we’d had a peaceful relationship, she would have quickly grown bored–and she would have ended up leaving me for a supposedly great love.”— is what she wants. From a metatextual perspective, the wife keeps her name: Ariane. The husband, by view of Ariane, does not keep his. He is sublimated fully into his role by her. She sees him as her husband, full stop. He sees her–sees all of her–and gives her what she needs. He, and his actions—cruel from an outsider’s perspective—create a text that she gets to translate, every day:
English is simplistic: no declensions to memorize, no adjective agreement. However, it’s a hilly language, irregular and changing: a rudimentary grammar, but expressions that sound good to the ear and an accent impossible to imitate. You can eliminate syntax errors, expand your vocabulary, adopt the tics of the language, but English will always have a leg up on you. Sometimes I ask myself why I didn’t choose a logical, predictable language like German. With English, I have to give up all control, which often irritates or frustrates me, but maybe also explains why I haven’t grown tired of it.
I am reminded of my Constitutional Law final, where while crafting a provisional Constitution, the professor’s goal was to get us to justify and codify, using legal principles, the existence of blood feuds between hypothetical tribes. This feels similar–at first blush, it’s hard not to pass judgment on this contentious relationship, but, much like our narrator with English translation, she mustn’t “grow tired of it.” This is what their matrimonial Constitution demands. You don’t change their relationship: you must accept them as they are, to keep them together. Carving out a space for controlled mayhem–be it blood feuds or clementine polymorphism–this, and only this, will keep their country/marriage together.
My Husband simply succeeds on every level. It’s a joy to actually read, it’s wild to be in the head of someone so intense, and the ability for the weight of the plot to shift in a scant few scenes evinces a deft touch. I think the author (and the translator—gosh this is the seamless translation) have earned my highest praise: I will gladly read anything else they create.