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