The Dangerous Husband: A Novel [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Reading The Dangerous Husband is like waking up to earthquake weather: Jane Shapiro's second novel exists in an atmosphere where something shattering is always about to happen. Its context is deceptive--New York in the '90s, a world of artists and writers (the narrator is a photographer), elegant dinner parties at chic apartments. But beneath the surface of this polished world there is trouble. Things are not quite right. For a start, the narrator's new husband, Dennis, cannot move two steps without tripping over himself. At one point he falls through a glass tabletop and almost maims his penis. He keeps an albino frog in a bucket in the basement. The frog floats there, colorless, a sign--but of what?

Shapiro is that rare breed: a truly funny writer who is also emotional and lyrical and deeply sad. Like Joy Williams, she seamlessly evokes a dark and unmistakable world. In The Dangerous Husband the narrator always feels like she is bluffing, playing the part of the wife, watching herself act the way a woman in love acts, wishing she could stop watching herself, wishing she could escape her acute and menacing self-consciousness. Shapiro describes loneliness in prose so precise it's breathtaking:

In loneliness, as we know, anyone who cares for you can become the object of a kind of vagrant love: dry cleaner, hair cutter, naturally any masseuse if you visit one; occasionally the doctor, always the nurse. If any of these evinces a bad attitude you can be crushed like a pip. Otherwise, depths of gratitude. The guy who fixes the frame of your eyeglasses (which you will have broken yourself, when you're lonely, by some method like forgetting they're in bed with you and fitfully rolling back and forth and crushing them in the night), this wonderful simple calm optician, holding up your own glasses in delicate fingers.

As the story progresses, the narrator begins to fear her husband more and more, and fear isolates her further. While at times the plot edges into the implausible, Shapiro never lets it stay suspended there for long. Even when you can't believe her story, you trust her. By the book's end, I knew I would follow her anywhere. --Emily White -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Trading the Jersey suburbs of her acclaimed debut, After Moondog (1992), for the brownstones of Brooklyn, Shapiro outdoes herself to pull off an absorbing black comedy again featuring an excruciatingly muddled marriage. Here, though, as far as the bewildered bride is concerned, it's one that quickly winds up like being on death row with every appeal exhausted. When they meet at a Manhattan dinner party, the chemistry is perfect: she (nameless) is a lonely photographer struggling to make ends meet; he, Dennis, a recently fired sociologist now working on a novel, is lonely, toobut rich. So they move in together in his brownstone and soon marry. Her photographic chronicle of the early days shows the usual blissful postcoital images, but as weeks turn into months, bruises and bandages begin to appear on both of them, and the daily routine outside the frame increasingly comes to resemble a nightmare. More than clumsy, more than messy, more than weirdmore than terrifyingDennis's every movement leaves wreckage in its wake. In response, his spouse tries first to deny, then to cope, to no avail. When Dennis accidentally drops an iron skillet on her big toe, putting her on crutches and costing her an out-of-town photo assignment, she begins to think in terms of self-defense. By chance, she soon runs across a novelist moonlighting as a hit man, and makes arrangements to put Dennis out of her misery. She can't go through with it, though, and so runs away instead, taking his pet albino frog with her. Lonely again, she goes back home after a week, but matters get only worse: first, the frog, then the cat, then the dog meet untimely ends, and when Dennis breaks her arm she knows with chilling certainty that it's finally come down to her or him. Such goings-on have rarely been so outrageously, horribly funny and yet so eerily familiar: this is writing at its most nuanced and exquisite. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

What's a never-married, impecunious, middle-aged photographer to do when she is presented with what seems like the solution to all her problems? And what's she to do when she sees the error of her ways? At the outset of this engaging novel, our protagonist meets and marries Dennis, the man of her dreams. But soon she realizes that he's slovenly and accident-prone, and, increasingly, the accidents bring her pain. After visiting an alarming array of Brooklyn's emergency rooms and discovering secrets from her husband's past, the protagonist begins fearing for her life and plotting against her husband. Dennis is sweet, loving, and thoughtfulAbut he's dangerous. Convinced that she cannot leave him but suffering yet another broken bone, she buys a knife and a rope and reads up on poisons. Shapiro's second novel (following After Moondog) is a wry, irony-filled fable of love and the kind of loneliness that clouds second thoughts until it's too late. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-AJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

As clever as it is heartbreaking, this comic masterpiece--now in paperback--tells the story of a marriage that is not, after all, exactly like anyone else's. Or is it?