Leah McLaren’s A Better Man looks at a couple who met when they were too young to know who they were and what they wanted in a partner.
'Men marry women with the hope they will never change," Albert Einstein once said. "Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably, they are both disappointed." This paradox is central to the dilemma the characters face in Leah McLaren's second novel, A Better Man. Maya and Nick Wakefield are a familiar sort: the couple who have everything, but suffer from grating ennui. The pair who seem perfect on the outside, but, internally, suffer the same anxieties as everyone else, and are helpless to do anything about it but self-medicate with wine and exercise (her) and work and women (him).
It's never clear precisely what drew Maya and Nick together in the first place, beyond the superficial – her lovely white-blond hair? The tiny galaxy of freckles on her face? How self-assured he was? His raspberry pocket square? (Please, no.) But perhaps that's the point. They met when they were too young to have a clear picture of who they were going to become – and certainly didn't imagine they would become who they did. Now they're so disillusioned with each other that whatever small things pulled them together have been forgotten, or have disappeared or were never going to be enough to sustain a lifetime together anyway.
McLaren does a fine job of showing who her characters are by unfurling a montage of telling scenes. Nick drearily observes, as he hears Maya wake one morning and pad across the bedroom floor, that she is about to "dress in something stretchy and body-contoured – selected from her vast collection of expensive, sweat-wicking exercise togs – before giving the twins their breakfast and supplemental breastfeed [for the natural antibodies] and hitting the gym." Later, he makes a failed attempt to blow his daughter's nose. "He can hear the wet congestion in her head as she gulps for breath, and finally – in abject defeat – he allows himself to look at his wife.…She crouches down, takes her daughter's face in her hands, places her mouth over Isla's tiny nose and proceeds to suck out the contents of her daughter's sinuses before spitting it out into the sink." This is a woman, to Nick, who has become a mother above all else, killing any desire he once felt for her.
Nick stays at the office because he can't stand coming home to his wife; he loves his children, but in a removed way. The idea of them is appealing – just like the idea of his life appeals to him. There is no authentic joy in any of it. So Nick meets with Gray, a shark of a divorce lawyer and a close friend of the couple, and tells him he wants out. But it's not so simple: Gray explains that because of all his assets, and because Maya is no longer working and is therefore a dependent, divorce will spell financial ruin for Nick.
He can stay with Maya and try to make it work, suggests Gray – "Try counselling, take a holiday. … Just stay married and save yourself the cash and your kids the therapy" – or he can try out a strategic option Gray only offers to clients off the record, in extreme cases: If he wants a better divorce settlement, Nick is going to have to become a better husband. Nick must also encourage Maya to go back to work and support her selflessly as she does so. If he can truly become the husband Maya needs him to be, when he finally does drop the divorce bomb – claiming a need for self-actualization – her reserves of anger and resentment will be so depleted she won't have the heart to take him to the cleaners. Or so the thinking goes. But won't Maya, a smart woman and former family lawyer herself, figure it out? Gray insists the plan is foolproof. And possibly, it is – except that secrets like this don't tend to stay buried. Especially in fiction.
A Better Man asks a compelling question: Can a broken marriage be fixed – as in really fixed, not just patched and mended so it can hobble along, with the couple concealing their hatred in front of the children and co-existing until such time as they are too old to be attractive to the opposite sex any more and too sick and tired to hate each other? However, what holds the book back initially is that the lack of interest Maya and Nick feel in their own lives makes the first third of the book rather a chore to read. Although McLaren portrays them expertly, there's a certain flatness to the writing, as if the author is as detached from this couple as they are from each other. Yes, their situation is recognizable, but this doesn't serve the purpose of making them feel real soon enough. They come off as dim caricatures with First World problems. They're people you're acquainted with, but definitely don't want to know very well.
Thankfully, as the book progresses and the superficially perfect lives of the Wakefields unravel in spectacular fashion, there finally come moments when McLaren's deft prose crackles with the pain of what it would truly feel like to be these people. It's desolate, this landscape of a marriage gone off. And it's familiar, because lots of people have either experienced it, or held the hand of a friend who is experiencing it or lived in fear of experiencing it themselves. Marriage is supposed to be a safe harbour. When it goes wrong – when the war is happening in our very own living room – life becomes excruciating.
In the end, A Better Man is unexpectedly beautiful, a tale of what happens when lovers lose sight of one another during life's journey, only to turn a sudden corner and find their partner there, in sharper focus than ever before, unrecognizable and yet, somehow, the same as always – and happily so. Marriage is supposed to bring out the best in people, but so often it brings out the worst. With A Better Man, McLaren shows that divorce can sometimes be the only solution – but not for the reasons you might think.
Marissa Stapley is the author of Mating for Life.