Pasha MallaMichelle Siu/The Globe and Mail
If you're the sort to get worked up about spoilers, maybe avoid not only what follows but also any novel that introduces a character named Anna and a reference to suicide by train in its first two pages. Fortunately the twists and turns of a cracking plot aren't exactly the point of Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau, which is more concerned with questions of mutability, chance and fate – in its beginning is its end, let's say, liberating the reviewer to divulge the juicy details in between.
Essbaum's Karenina (and, maybe more so, Bovary) stand-in is Anna Benz, an American expat, whose husband, Bruno – a banker – has relocated the family to his hometown of Dietlikon, a suburb of Zurich. The novel takes place in 2006, eight years after the Benzes move to Switzerland and two years before the world's economic systems will be thrown into disarray. So life in the heart of global finance should be all prosperity and ease, and no well-off Westerner should want for anything.
Except that Anna, nearing middle age without a bank account or a driver's licence to her name, is miserable, trapped in a stillborn marriage and friendlessly drifting through the regulated sterility of Swiss culture. Anna thinks of herself as "a swinging door, a body gone limp in the arms of another body carrying it," though she also believes her passive existence "made for relative peace at the house." As such, even motherhood (two boys, one daughter) has been a capitulation, and her only acts of independence and agency involve trudging to a nearby hilltop and weeping for hours on end – and sleeping with strangers.
Yet these affairs seem more perfunctory than passionate, save one a couple of years before with a visiting Bostonian named Stephen that might have approached true love. The question of whether it has hastened or simply offered respite from Anna's anomie haunts the story; meanwhile the world seems to judge and shame her: "Life. Risk. Trivial Pursuit. Sorry. Even the board games pointed a finger at Anna."
Scenes of family outings, private reminiscences and adulterous sex interpolate with pointed grammar lessons from Anna's German class ("'An action that is done by one's own self to one's own self requires a reflexive verb,'" etc.) and visits to a Jungian analyst who specializes in semantic distinctions ("Passivity is deference … Neutrality is non-partisan") and literalist dream interpretation. The scenes with Doktor Messerli provide the novel's closest brush with light relief, revealing as they do, with gentle irony, Anna's self-awareness in the face of her shrink's rote observations.
The book also contains some beautiful writing, particularly when Essbaum allows the narrator space to unpack an emotional experience. "It's an otherworldly moment when the curtains behind which a lie has been hiding are pulled apart," she writes. "When the slats on the blinds are forced open and a flash of truth explodes into the room. You can feel the crazing of the air. Light shatters every lie's glass." Yet these sorts of passages often clunk up against anomalously inelegant phrasing; a few lines later, Bruno's "drill-bit stare bored through her," and in a proceeding chapter a revelation "hit … like a sledgehammer." In such an otherwise rigorously crafted book, one might assume that the assonance is deliberate, perhaps analogous to the manicured beauty of Switzerland and the raw ugliness of Anna's private life.
Essbaum, the author of four collections of poems, also has a knack for structural cohesion, and a tautly composed symbolic system interweaves several narrative and thematic threads throughout the book. Over 300 pages, however, some of these devices can start to feel repetitive and there's an attendant claustrophobia to all the recurring symbols and signs. Again, one could suggest an intentional attempt at mirroring Anna's own entrapment – she is, after all, stuck in a foreign, isolating country and the novel's various patterns all lead her back to herself. There's both vanity and masochism, for example, in how Anna reads every German lesson as an indictment: After learning that "strong verbs are irregular" and "weak verbs … follow typical rules," she thinks, "Like people. … The weak ones are all the same."
For all its admirable craftwork, this relentless solipsism overwhelms the novel's final section. One begins to less want Anna to escape her situation than to escape her. As a study of malaise, Hausfrau is smart and well-rendered, but as tragedy it lacks resonance, flat-lining as it does from beginning to end. The ways in which Essbaum aestheticizes and intellectualizes emotion are more interesting and it is Anna's obsession with predestination that offers one of the novel's most compelling throughlines. In the book's last chapter, after she confronts a priest for answers and he compares life to a string of dominoes in a "simple, sincere analogy built for a child," Anna concludes: "Accidents that are fated to happen simply will." And, in the moments before that final, fateful accident, she has another thought: "The plot of her life," Anna realizes, "had already been published."