The Dangerous Husband Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Dangerous Husband Book

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 WhiteRead More

from£22.93 | RRP: £16.99
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £6.63
  • Product Description

    The day I had scheduled for the death of my husband dawned early and suddenly, with a lucid blue sky.

    In The Dangerous Husband, Jane Shapiro's witty, dark, brilliantly funny novel, they meet and almost immediately fall in love. Like everyone, they have been alone. He is perfect for her-charming and sexy and awkward and sweet. They are forty; it is time for them to marry and shelter each other.

    When the honeymoon ends, as honeymoons always do, real life begins, with its surprises. He trips up stairs, falls going down. He cooks a tasty dinner and the kitchen ends up looking like a slaughterhouse. Absorbed in sexual experimentation, he shatters the coffee table. He tenderly wrenches her neck; he breaks her arm. "It was turning out that my husband's dishevelment was incomparable, potent, ramifying. It could destroy whole little worlds." It will surely destroy her. Unless she can kill him first. This is a mordant, glittering novel about our preoccupation with romantic love and about the entanglements of marriage-about the longings and terrors, the erotic lives, the lonelinesses and collusion of couples. As ingenious as it is heartbreaking, The Dangerous Husband is a comic masterpiece, the story of a marriage that is not, after all, exactly like everyone else's. Or is it?

  • 0316782475
  • 9780316782470
  • Jane Shapiro
  • 31 December 1998
  • Little, Brown and Company
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 256
  • First Edition
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.