Book Review: Novel About My Wife

I hardly know where to start with this review.

The short story: fabulous book.

The longer story is far more complicated. Novel About My Wife, written by Emily Perkins, is the study of a marriage on the verge of the ultimate change: parenthood. It is also an alarming character study about how love can so wholly blind one half of a couple that devastation is the only outcome. As the flap says, this story is "about the need for escape and the perils of forgetting," but this a typical flap-like oversimplification.

Tom Stone is a writer coming to terms with the failure of his career. His wife, Ann, is expecting their first child and throughout her pregnancy seems to be in a prolonged phase of mania. They've just bought a house in a sketchy neighbourhood, and it's in desperate need of renovation. But there is something ominous within its walls, and it seems to Ann there is an impending sense of doom about it. She also believes she is being stalked by a local homeless man. Tom, overprotective and oblivious, hopelessly tries to keep things from - both literally and figuratively - falling down around their heads, and sells out in the process.

Both have big-time baggage, unsurprising for a couple barely forty, and it comes back to haunt them. Tom tells us in the first few pages that Ann will be dead by the end of the book, and the mystery surrounding how this comes about is compelling and chilling. Very carefully, Tom constructs a story about his wife in an attempt to explain the quintessential unknown: what is really going on in the brain of my spouse? At the same time, it seems he is using his writing to try to heal the trauma of the story's outcome. Perkins leaves just enough out to tantalize the reader by necessitating drawing your own conclusions from what's missing rather than what's there, which speaks to the overall theme of the narrative.

The writing is tight and Tom's voice is exquisitely tortured and cynical, yet comical. Perkins has a gift for descriptions like this one of Tom's take on his and Ann's poverty: "We had enough packets of pasta, cans of borlotti beans, tinned tomatoes and jars of pesto to survive a small Tuscan apocalypse. Tuna, you may remember from your student days, can be rendered interesting in multiple ways if you don't think about cat food. Brown rice bestows moral superiority for at least an hour."

This is a book to be savoured and read over and over again, each time peeling back a new layer of understanding. So, as such, it will be remaining on my shelf.