tombstones + mammograms

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Attachment, by Isabel Fonseca, Borzoi

Isabel Fonseca writing a novel from the perspective of a betrayed wife is something like Monica Lewinsky complaining about the drycleaning bill. Fonseca was an intimate of philosopher Antonia Phillips when she began an affair with Phillips' husband and the father of her two sons, Martin Amis. The marriage, Amis's first, sank in an swamp of publicity, but it would be years before he married his mistress.

Once powerfully pretty when she smiled, Fonseca is, at 50 or thereabouts, somber and hawkish, and it is not difficult to see her character, Jean Hubbard, as just another mask. Mark, Hubbard's ad executive spouse, is much like Amis in his ways, and the narrative is widely rumored to be a palimpsest of their marriage. Fonseca has denied any “winking thing going on” about her life, but those familiar with the situation privately disagree. This is, of course, the tawdriest kind of publicity – did he? didn't he? – but the question remains: would Attachment have been published were Amis not her husband?

The narrative unfolds with a discovery: Jean opens what is “unmistakably a lover's letter” addressed to her husband. She is outraged: playfulness has no place in her universe of tombstones and mammograms. The missive upon which the plot pivots is, in itself, implausible (“I'm going to send you a reminder to drool over, you unbelievably filthy old man”), and sounds more like a framework for a wronged wife to interpolate her own sexualized contempt for her husband. And the supposed mistress, too, is ludicrous, a near-autistic pornographic pantomime of a human being, and - like just about every other woman in the book with the exception of Jean - one-dimensional.

Mark's mother is, ironically, referred to as an “old snob with her groundless sense of superiority” because “she'd never truly acknowledged her American daughter-in-law” (Fonseca is American); of Jean's own First in Law at Oxford (Fonseca was educated at Oxford ), she writes: “Did he have any idea how hard it was … How hard she'd tried. Any secretary could learn the vallenato.” In contrast to the star-spangled genius Jean, her social inferiors – women from pubs, women from offices – are risible.

Men, too, are lessened by her jaundiced eye. Of a regional accent, Fonseca writes: “She winced at his ‘loonch' and ‘Soosix', listening with both hands on her throat, like a person feeling for swollen glands”). Others are “seedy”, or treated with imperialistic disdain (“the cheerless Korean,” Australians, the “grinn[ing]” islander with “his gold tooth”). Her courtesy is never wasted on those who cannot advance her fulminant social ambitions (“And would you dispense instantly with the ‘Brunhilda', you fucking yob ”).

Jean clings to her degrees and the status accorded by her high-profile husband like a monkey to a palm tree in a cyclone. She embarks on an email correspondence with her husband's supposed mistress, never for a moment considering that the supposed mistress immediately recognized that she was not writing to Mark; instead, she uses the exchanges as a vehicle to express the embarrassing sexual, social, and marital frustrations she cannot express with her own husband, whose only real charm is presented as his success.

Mark's hair is “wind-eroded dune grass above the expanding beach of his face.” Her plans, and possibly all her courage, are “derailed by his morning shit.” He is “witty but not challenging.” Increasingly, “his elaborate cocktails were his creative juices.” The “goo” on his “very small” pompadour “smelled old, faintly medicinal.” Regarding him, all Jean can see “is his decline … He looked gray, pouchy along the jawline. His jokes were reflexive, also old … his bottom lip slid out a fraction – once sexy, suddenly irritating, elderly. His habit of constantly fingercombing his hair seemed vain and faggy.”

Is Fonseca bleeding Amis of sexual confidence in an effort to make him tractable?

The marriage, too, is depicted as a wasteland. Devoid of intimacy (she does not confront her husband), devoid of insight (she does not understand why her husband would prefer another), devoid of pleasure, and, importantly, devoid of humor, Jean's relationship with her husband is as meretricious and cold-blooded as any in modern fiction. Unlike, say, the grief, longing, and humiliation expressed in Nothing Serious, Justine Levy's fictionalized account of losing her husband to Carla Bruni (now the First Lady of France but then Levy's father-in-law's girlfriend), Jean's only real passion is for herself.

“All that education and then – nothing,” she cries, devastated more by her lack of professional achievement than by the realization that her marriage – previously “as manageable as a diorama” (in itself, a telling analogy) – is so flawed as to be disrupted by a “phantasmagoria”. That single moment of self-awareness scalds: “Jerking back from her reflection … she saw one thing she didn't like: that darting expression of doubt and self-defense – its sharpness reminded her of Bud the kestrel, beady eye aglitter.”

Fonseca is not a bad writer, but a dishonest one; she uses prose to obscure truth. Whether she is incapable of the depth of feeling that can produce an Anna Karenina or simply incapable of translating such feeling into a fine novel is academic. But if there is “no winking thing going on”, why is Mark so like Amis? And how could she invite such speculation and mockery into his life and the lives of their two daughters?

*Originally published in Harper's Bazaar