Things Fall Apart
sChaRPeR, diane
Things Fall Apart A woman’s world is suddenly complicated. BY DIANE SCHARPER Isabel Fonseca’s fi rst novel begins with a bang as health columnist Jean Hubbard opens a pornographic letter...
...Soon Jean has to leave what was once her island “paradise” to go back to London for a medical consultation...
...To make matters worse, Phyllis, Jean’s mother, arrives—ostensibly for a maternal visit, but actually to let Jean know that her father has been having mini-strokes and will need surgery...
...half-heard conversations lead to misunderstandings...
...Complicated by a pregnancy, which may or may not have involved Mark, the affair ended with the birth of a daughter, Sophie, who is now in her late twenties and who might be a lesbian with an unseemly interest in Victoria, Mark and Jean’s 19-year-old daughter...
...Instead of confronting Mark directly, Jean gives her imagination full rein...
...BY DIANE SCHARPER Isabel Fonseca’s fi rst novel begins with a bang as health columnist Jean Hubbard opens a pornographic letter addressed to her husband, Mark...
...As with most fi rst novels, the story possesses some similarity to Fonseca’s real life—a situation made intriguing by the reputation of Martin Amis, her husband...
...As far as Jean (who’s nearing 46) knows, she and Mark have a satisfying relationship, even though they are frustrated at times by conditions on St...
...Lest Attachment degenerate into a romance novel, Fonseca inserts numerous literary allusions...
...As a tension reliever, she has an explicitly detailed one-night stand with Dan, sexual predator par excellence—and one of Mark’s colleagues...
...Mark was only 17 when he fell in love with a French beauty who left him for another man...
...But by then, this story of aging and adultery has begun to seem like an overly long game of “He loves me...
...And why would he have mysteriously strayed from a conference he was attending a few years previous...
...What about the relationship he had long before Jean and Mark met...
...As Jean muses over the incident, the plot takes one small step forward, then goes back or sideways to fi ll in the context...
...Now, Jean, who always looked up to her father, really begins to distrust her husband...
...Reading the salutation, “Dear Thing 1,” as well as references to “Sexy Beast,” “Naughtyboy,” and “fi lthy old man,” Jean fi nds it diffi cult to put the letter down...
...Misunderstandings multiply and grow out of proportion...
...About halfway into the story Fonseca alludes to the plot of Othello, suggesting not too subtly that the circumstances of Mark’s letter may have been a setup similar to the circumstances surrounding Desdemona’s strawberry-embroidered handkerchief—with, perhaps, Dan or Sophie or even Larry as Iago...
...At an email caf?, she initiates a correspondence with the author of the letter, a 26year-old named Giovana, who seems to think that she is receiving a message from the fi lthy old man of her dreams...
...The reader gets it right away, but Jean doesn’t...
...In addition, Phyllis tells her that her father’s infi delity many years earlier was the reason that she divorced him...
...She also reheats to boiling a former relationship that she had with Larry, one of her father’s law partners...
...he loves me not...
...It’s only on the fi nal pages that Jean understands what’s going on...
...it can be anything from fi nding the aforementioned letter to noticing the style of Mark’s hair to remembering a comment that seemed slightly out of place...
...Jacques, a tropical island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where she’s taking a sabbatical...
...Adding to Jean’s worry over Victoria is a possible diagnosis of breast cancer...
...Like Jean Hubbard, Fonseca is an American-born 46-year-old (former) columnist who divides her time between London and Uruguay, with frequent visits to her roots in the United States...
...Half-seen events are misinterpreted...
...Jean isn’t sure because Victoria lives in London where she’s fi nishing college...
...The trouble is that the story tends to lose momentum, something which Fonseca tries mightily to sustain through a plethora of complications— everything from reminiscences of 9/11 to a blackout in New York (which endangers her father) to her own missed connections with Victoria...
...From London, she travels to New York and her father’s hospital bed, where his condition has worsened...
...She liberally quotes lines from Philip Larkin’s poetry and from his memoir...
...The pattern seen throughout the novel goes like this: An incident occurs...
...With the knowledge she’s gleaned from this letter, she now questions the stability of her marriage...
...But why would he make so many trips back to London...
...In both cities, she continues to email Giovanna, all the while fuming at Mark...
...She can hardly believe that the letter is referring to her 53-year old husband...
...As Jean sees it at fi rst, there’s no reason to think that Mark’s been involved with other women: The head of a successful London advertising agency, he would have no time for such peccadilloes...
...Since the results of her mammogram are inconclusive, the island’s doctors suggest she go to London for further tests...
...She makes several lengthy references to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” as she puns the notion of losing her island paradise home as well as the paradise of her marriage and her own state of innocence, and Mark’s...
...Told through the eyes of the protagonist, Jean Hubbard, Attachment works on the principle of an unreliable point of view...
...Diane Scharper is editor of the forthcoming Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 43
