THE HUSBANDS
By Chandler Baker
Nora Spangler is wrung dry. She’s a mother of one small child, with another on the way, and a plaintiff’s attorney for a firm. Her husband, Hayden, is incapable of complex parenting tasks, like persuading the couple’s young daughter to use the bathroom. Gary, Nora’s boss, calls her on a Sunday because he doesn’t know how to turn off caps lock. (“Is the light on the left side of your keyboard green?” she asks.)
“The Whisper Network,” Chandler Baker’s first novel for adults, focused on the failures of a sexist, unjust office in the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit. “The Husbands” also gestures at the workplace but turns the bulk of its attention to the inadequacies of the nuclear family, where women are expected not only to have it all, but to do it all, too. The book reads like a direct descendant of Ira Levin’s 1972 feminist classic, “The Stepford Wives,” but while Levin lampoons the housewife archetype as a machine in service of a man, Baker depicts the contemporary, leaning-in working mother as one who needs to pacify her husband just to get to the end of the day. Her critique of the heteronormative American family and the malicious ways men uphold sexist power structures is straightforward and unsubtle. Baker insists that, while a sexist society may be the culprit behind mothers’ distress, it makes villains of us all.
Throughout the novel, Nora lingers upon two worries that she repeats to herself like mantras: that Hayden is a good husband, and that he doesn’t help out nearly enough. Her agitation with Hayden’s good-husband, bad-husband act is the book’s primary source of suspense, though a tangle of mysteries provide surface tension.
As her pregnancy progresses, Nora decides that her two-story Austin home is too confining for her growing family. She becomes enamored with a house in Dynasty Ranch, a picture-perfect development where the lawns are wide and neatly trimmed, the ranch homes are sprawling and the wives — every named couple at Dynasty Ranch is straight — are at the top of their fields in psychiatry, neuroscience and real estate. The husbands have unfettered access to a gorgeous golf course, but they’re so focused on KonMari-ing their pantries and making sandwiches, they rarely seem to enjoy it. A lonely Nora latches onto the women of Dynasty Ranch, who persuade her to represent a local resident in a wrongful-death lawsuit. Penny March’s house burned down with her husband, Richard, inside.
The fire is the book’s central mystery, but not its most compelling. Neither is the question of what the wives of Dynasty Ranch are doing to their husbands in an attempt to gain what they think they require from their partners to achieve career success. Rather, it’s how Nora might respond to her escalating panic over the mess of her own life, feelings of powerlessness, fear that exhaustion and distraction will cause harm to her children.
There are no astonishing twists in “The Husbands”; anyone who’s read “The Stepford Wives” (or watched the movie) will have an idea how this ends. Still, I found myself holding my breath, both hoping and not hoping that Nora would choose differently. It’s a testament to Baker’s talents as a writer that the final scenes of this familiar story are a gut punch nonetheless. She has a gift for depicting flawed, desperate characters who make decisions that are as sympathetic as they are disgusting and selfish.
However, there is one flaw I’d be remiss not to mention. Baker portrays the despair of overwhelmed women like Nora yet barely acknowledges the plight of other mothers who take on the work Nora herself can’t handle — women who receive no help of their own. Rarely does the book recognize the laborers who make the Spanglers’ lives easier, and even then, it’s portrayed as a burden: “This is how the Spangler family will go broke, one $3.99 delivery fee plus $5 driver tip at a time.”
But what Baker makes evident is that even the height of upper-middle-class white privilege can’t save women from falling victim to their selfish, bumbling husbands and overbearing bosses. The question is how much you blame them when they snap.
"Review" - Google News
August 03, 2021 at 03:11AM
https://ift.tt/2Vfutkm
Book Review: ‘The Husbands,’ by Chandler Baker - The New York Times
"Review" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqLwiz
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Book Review: ‘The Husbands,’ by Chandler Baker - The New York Times"
Post a Comment