Hausfrau
Jill Alexander Essbaum, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812997538
Summary
Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning—"a modern-day Anna Karenina tale."*
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 ourselve. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Bay City, Texas, USA
• Education—University of Texas; University of Houston
• Awards—Bakeless Poetry Prize
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas
Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, as well as its sister anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800-Present. She is the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and recipient of two NEA literature fellowships. A member of the core faculty at the University of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program, she lives and writes in Austin, Texas. (From the publisehr .)
Read more about the author on the Poetry Foundation Website.
Book Reviews
Hausfrau...seems positioned to ride a wave of comparisons to the erotic stylings of E. L. James....[but] the two are very different. Ms. Essbaum has far more sophistication, but she tethers it to the tale of a morose, insufferable American narcissist who is bored by her Swiss husband.... But Ms. Essbaum hasn’t got much of a plot in mind either, so the book meanders from sexual liaisons—which quickly develop a perfunctory sameness and have nothing like the superlucrative kinks of Ms. James’s books—to psychoanalysis appointments to those dreadful moments when Anna has time to slow down and contemplate herself.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey.
Sunday Express (UK)
There is much to admire in Essbaum's intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel, including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present. It is equally impressive that Essbaum is able to retain our sympathy, if just barely, for her lost and self-involved protagonist—at least until the novel's heavily foreshadowed, but still startling, conclusion.
Julia M. Klein - Chicago Tribune
We’re in literary territory as familiar as Anna’s name, but Essbaum makes it fresh with sharp prose and psychological insight.
San Francisco Chronicle
For a first novelist, Essbaum is extraordinary because she is a poet. Her language is meticulous and resonant and daring.
NPR’s Weekend Edition
A powerful, lyrical novel.... Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary and a poet’s fascination with language.
Huffington Post
[Hausfrau] feels more contemporary, subjective, and just plain funny than classical bourgeois ennui. Imagine Tom Perrotta’s American nowheresvilles swapped out for a tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German grammar and European hypocrisy.
New York Magazine
Brain-surgically constructed to fascinate you, entertain you, and then make you question what a life lived with meaning looks like—all with a sense of poetic discipline and introspection.
Los Angeles Magazine
(Starred review.) Over a century after the publication of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, poet Essbaum proves in her debut novel that there is still plenty of psychic territory to cover in the story of "a good wife, mostly."... The realism of Anna’s dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel are marvels of the form.... This novel is masterly as it moves toward its own inescapable ending, and Anna is likely to provoke strong feelings in readers well after the final page.
Publishers Weekly
An American in her thirties, Anna Benz has a picture-perfect life, with glowing children, a gorgeous house, and a Swiss banker husband. Of course, what looks that good on the outside is often rotten on the inside, and Anna launches a series of affairs. This debut by a recipient of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and two NEA literature fellowships is an in-house favorite
Library Journal
[Essbaum’s protagonist] shares more than her name with that classic adulteress, Anna Karenina, but Essbaum has given a deft, modern facelift to the timeless story of a troubled marriage and tragic love in this seductive first novel.
Booklist
Between caring for three children, visiting a Jungian analyst and taking a German class, Anna wouldn't seem to have much time for extramarital liaisons, but like her namesake, Madame Karenina, she manages.... There's plenty of tension—will Anna get caught?—but it's hard to be invested in the life of a woman who doesn't care much about it herself. A smart book that entertains page by page but doesn't add up to anything larger.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. That Anna. So—really—what’s her deal? Her thoughts loop on a script of immutable passivity, but is that her whole story? From the onset we know she is a flawed protagonist, a damaged character, a woman who is "nothing but a series of poor choices executed poorly." Taking into account Anna’s personal history, her psychic and spiritual makeup, and those aforementioned poor choices, is there any part of this tragedy that somehow isn’t her fault? What should she be held accountable for? Of what, if anything, are you willing to absolve her?
2. Bruno proposes to Anna with the words "I think you would make a good wife for me." What, in your opinion, would make him think that? They’ve been together for over a decade. By book’s end it’s clear that Bruno has either known about or suspected Anna’s infidelities the entire time. Why would he tolerate them? Why would he tolerate her? Is this a sign of his weakness or his strength? What does he "get" out of this marriage?
3. Mary, in her decency, stands in direct opposition to the self-centered narcissism of the majority of Anna’s actions. Simply put, Mary seems to be everything that Anna should be but isn’t. But the book suggests that Mary’s two-shoes aren’t altogether goody, so to speak. In three separate instances, she "spills" herself in front of Anna: when she drops her purse and blurts out a more-Anna-than-Mary expletive, when she drops her purse and the erotic novel (and the wistful truth that she regrets not exploring her sexuality) tumbles out, and, finally, when she admits to the bullying and setting the fire. In these ways, Mary has more in common with Anna than Anna is open to recognizing. Do you think Mary can see past Anna’s façade? Do you think she understands Anna on a fundamental level? If not, then do you think she would ever be able to? What do you think will happen to Mary after the book ends?
4. Anna’s lack of morality is almost shocking. What do you think is her gravest mistake? Is there any point during the course of the narrative where she could have stopped the progression of events?
5. Anna rarely tells Doktor Messerli the whole truth. Why, then, do you think she continues the analysis?
6. Anna has never learned to speak German, and yet she exhibits an unmistakable talent for language: she plays with words, turns puns, thinks in entendre—though rarely does she speak these things aloud. Is it shyness that prevents her from showing this side of herself? Fear? What would it look like if Anna could tap into her "voice"? What would it change?
7. Of all the children, Charles is the most dear to Anna. Victor is too much like Bruno for Anna to fully trust. But as the sole memento of the relationship with Stephen, one might assume that Polly Jean would hold the spot closest to Anna’s heart. Discuss Anna’s relationship with her children. She won’t win mother of the year in anyone’s contest—but is there any way in which she can be commended? Is there anything she does as a mother that is correct? Good? Nurturing?
8. Anna confesses she majored in home economics in college. Couple this with the perfect memory of sewing with her mother, and the seed of Anna’s present psychology begins to form. As her station as a wife and a mother starts to fail her (or rather, she, them), we are able to understand that somewhere in Anna’s fundamental self she was raised to be these things. Why does she cling to this fantasy if it doesn’t seem to suit her?
9. At the end of chapter 6, Anna thinks, "I wish I’d never met the man." Which man do you suppose she means?
10. Doktor Messerli warns Anna that "consciousness doesn’t come with an automatic ethic," and Anna’s choices seem to bear this out. Taking into consideration Doktor Messerli’s explanation of the Shadow, her story of the Teufelsbrücke, and the final events of the book, is it possible to argue that, ethics aside, Anna has come into complete consciousness?
11. Archie says to Anna that a man can smell a woman’s sadness. In the same vein, Anna talks herself through the morning after the physical confrontation with Bruno with a "You had this coming" speech to herself ("I provoked this.... I brought this to myself."). By this reasoning, Anna is an active participant in her own downfall. But Anna claims to be almost entirely passive. Do you consider Anna to be more passive or more active? How does this complicate your understanding of Anna’s psychology?
12. In terms of the structure of the novel, the analytic sessions with Doktor Messerli serve to explicate, illuminate, underscore, and complicate the plot of the book and any conclusion that Anna believes she’s arrived at. Are there any places in the book where this is particularly meaningful to you?
13. There’s an intriguing symmetry to the way that the grammar of the German language—the tenses, moods, conjugations, false cognates, infinitives, et cetera—lays itself out in a pattern that easily overlays the poignant heartbreak of the novel. And yet, one of the themes of Hausfrau is language’s ultimate inadequacy. Is that tension resolvable? If so, how? Is this something you have encountered in your own life?
14. The book depends upon the coolness of the Swiss, the impenetrable nature of the landscape, and the solitude of nighttime in order to fully call forth Anna’s deep despair and alienation. Could this book take place in another setting? Anna’s everyday environs—the hill, the bench, the trains, the Coop—become characters in their own right Are there other functions the novel’s setting serves?
15. Hausfrau is in some sense a study in female sexuality. What might the author be suggesting about the sexual appetites of a woman at midlife? What might the author be suggesting about a woman’s emotional needs?
16. An entirely speculative question: What do you think will happen to Bruno and Victor and Polly Jean? Can you imagine their lives post-Anna?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)