Ah, the delight of an extra-marital affair. Authors can't get enough of them and, it seems, neither can husbands or wives. Isabel Fonseca's novel "Attachment" is a recent addition to this duplicitous canon.
Jean Hubbard, the American wife of an Englishman named Mark, stumbles upon a missive from his delicious and descriptive mistress, Giovana. Correctly guessing the password to his naughtyboy1 account, Jean exchanges spicy emails with her adversary. The trajectory of Jean's erotic education follows a steep incline, seemingly in tandem with her husband's physical experiences.
Mid-life crises are a concrete phenomenon and certainly worth inspection. They impact families and sometimes drastically change the lives of more people than the one in crisis. The Hubbards appear in the clutches of such a crisis. The reader might react more to the calamity if Jean were more introspective. Instead she remains mired in her own psyche. Jean rarely rises above her predicament. Instead of challenging her husband the minute she hears of Giovana, as one would hope a mature woman in a long-term marriage would do, Jean perpetuates the transgression.
Jean is 46, hardly old, and certainly not in decline. She is a successful writer for a magazine and has a grown daughter. Her preoccupation with her husband's affair and her contradictory silence grow tiresome quickly.
Jean and Mark have chosen to live for an indefinite period on St. Jacques, an island off the coast of India. There, Jean flirts with the mailman and makes half-hearted, embittered ventures to the gym. She glares at the toned bodies around her, comparing herself to these younger women. Her sojourns usually end with a perusal of Mark's naughtyboy1 account. He returns with relative frequency to England and Jean is left to fill in his absences with the snippets Giovana provides.
Fonseca is fairly restrained in the virtual exchanges she creates between Giovana and Jean posing as Mark. At a certain point in the narrative, Jean assumes Mark's position as the adulterer. When Jean begins to delve into extra-marital explorations of her own, the firsthand reality exceeds the promises of what was offered virtually. Jean's actual experiences are much more vivid than those that come to fruition with the barrier of a computer screen. She is shocked, and finds herself in over her head.
The visual landscape of Fonseca's novel is particularly detailed. She seems to have the layout of the houses and the decor of each kitchen forefront in her mind. It is an interesting contrast to have a protagonist caught entirely in her head and still have the readers visualizing the luminous shine of wet British pavement. These conditions fail to complement one another. Fonseca's dialogue moves rapidly and is quite humorous, but it is a little too clever to be true of real life.
Jean is far too rooted in her head for her to give us much perspective on the cast around her. The relationships that are used as signposts in her life and as anchors for the novel are underdeveloped, making it difficult to invest in them. Fonseca's knack for description is an asset but she does not seem able to weave it convincingly into the greater tapestry of the novel. This unsuccessful fusion leaves the reader with an eyeful of scenery but very little sympathy for Jean.
"Attachment" finds some traction in its interesting familial relationships. Unfortunately, this thread is not successfully explored. Jean's relationship with her daughter is constructed in little more than oblique terms. Her relationship with her parents is never brought into focus. There is the haunting presence of the daughter of Mark's first lover to be dealt with as well. The shades continue to multiply in this story. They clutter it. The increasing growth of the novel's population mars all attempts to probe their depths.
The novel touches on the opacity created by a new era of communication. New personas can be assumed by anyone on the Internet. The tone of an e-mail is easily misread and can lead to pleasant or disastrous outcomes. This conundrum of our age is an interesting one. In "Attachment," however, this line of inquiry drowns in the wake of its adulterous curiosity.