"Attachment": A too-clinical portrait of a midlife crisis
"Attachment"
by Isabel Fonseca
Knopf, 306 pp., $23.95
Adultery fears, a cancer scare, elderly parents in bad health, the reigniting of an old flame. All these fairly common midlife ingredients are shaken into Isabel Fonseca's first novel. Shaken, though not always well-stirred.
In "Attachment," Fonseca (known for her excellent close-up study of European gypsy life, "Bury Me Standing") introduces us to Jean, an attractive, well-heeled, American-born health writer in her mid-40s, who is quickly plunged into a maelstrom of middle-age anxieties.
During a lengthy sojourn on a tropical island with her husband, English advertising hotshot Mark, Jean makes two disturbing discoveries: Her latest mammogram is abnormal. And Mark is receiving sexy letters and e-mails (complete with suggestive photos) from another woman.
The couple head back to London for further medical advice, and to find their collegiate daughter madly in love. Soon enough, Jean is trying to sort out a lot of plot strands — including whether to take a lover herself and/or leave Mark.
Fonseca charts Jean's emotional temperature and her thought processes with brisk lucidity. And she excels at the art of description — of car rides through the streets of London and around a poor but lushly flowering island; of shaving a bedridden parent; of examining one's husband with a loving but honest eye.
Still, it's hard to get really attached to the people in "Attachment." There's nothing at all snotty about Jean. She gets as "bedraggled" by fate as the rest of us. But there's something clinical about this portrait: She seems to exist at arm's length from the reader in a social sphere of moneyed, artsy people who have the time and wherewithal to endlessly ponder a lot of "what-ifs." And the dough to jet off great distances, without a worry about the fare.
But it's not fair to hold that against Jean, or Fonseca — who, in real life, is the wife of famed Brit novelist Martin Amis. Hey, they have the right to moan, too, about those midlife predicaments not even heaps of cold, hard pounds sterling will insulate you from.
See Also
posted by adamargitwagner @ 10:27
<< Home