Title: Hausfrau Author: Jill Alexander Essbaum
Published: March 17, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 324
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna can't easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it's difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum's debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
Hausfrau, really, is not the type of book I enjoy reading (not that it’s necessarily a book that should be enjoyed). Intellectually, I liked the book. It was well-written, and the main character’s psychology was complex. I believe Jill Alexander Essbaum displays talent and perception in this novel, about an unhappy housewife and the ways in which she unravels. Hausfrau is very good—but it does not satisfy. I finished the novel and immediately thought “what a waste”, and while that applies to a great many things in this novel and about this novel, for different reasons, it’s overall not a great first impression to be having.
What this novel does is expertly explore the mind of Anna Benz, a wife and mother who feels trapped in her husband’s native Switzerland and trapped by her own passivity. The timeline is nonlinear, the scenes are short and interspersed with moments between Anna and her psychoanalyst. But as the book marches on, Anna’s situation becomes progressively more chaotic, more hopeless, and more damning. I feel that over the course of Hausfrau, I got to know Anna very well. And I didn’t like her or feel compassion for her or really have any sort of warm feelings toward her, but as a character she was interesting, and I think that’s what Essbaum has managed to do. A miserable, unfaithful, defensive woman is not worth reading about for the sake of an entertaining story, for me, but unpacking her psychology and exploring her motives and reasons and past is worth reading. I was honestly surprised by how readable this book was, considering the subject matter. But Essbaum’s talent with characterization is what makes the story work, as I was fascinated in spite of how miserable and difficult the story is.
And yet. And yet, I did not feel that, in the end, the time I spent with this book was justified. The conclusion left me feeling upset and cheated and vacant. Yes, I suppose that there is really only one logical way for Hausfrau to go, and perhaps I should have expected it. But I felt as if I had spent enough time with Anna to have gotten something out of the end. But that’s not the story the author wanted to tell, and perhaps it’s more my fault than Hausfrau’s, but all the same my immediate though still stands: what a waste.
Is this book brilliant in its complexity and characterization and nuance? Yes. Absolutely. Hausfrau sets out to reveal Anna Benz’s character and look at how her mental state affects her situation, and it succeeds in every possible way.
But did Hausfrau give me a feeling of satisfaction/vindication/resolution/etc. when I reached the end and saw where this complicated and perplexing character ended up? No, not really. And that is the issue.
