Hausfrau’s 37-year-old Anna Benz has it all. She is the attractive wife of a Swiss banker and together they have three healthy children. Anna lives with her family in the lovely Zurich suburb of Dietlikon. Mother-in-law Ursula is nearby, available to babysit at a moment’s notice.
Yet Anna Benz is miserable. She salves her misery by taking Switzerland’s trains to extramarital assignations. These affairs are empty, the sexual pleasure fleeting.
It takes the reader a bit to realize that Anna suffers from anhedonia, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts”. Over the next 320 pages, Anna roams Zurich in a state of near-catatonic detachment, rousing only during sex, mostly of the extramarital variety.
Jill Alexander Essbaum’s first novel bleakly evokes the life of a woman adrift. Details are scant; Anna’s parents were killed in an automobile accident. She has no siblings, relatives, or friends. Her birthplace is unknown. She attended University, where she studied Home Economics.
Apart from a fixation on Stephen Nicodemus, a man she meet in the street and had a brief affair with, she is moved by no person or thing. Her marriage is faltering, her maternal instinct wan. Despite favoring second son Charles, Anna’s love isn’t strong enough to spare him the negative impact of her sexual liaisons. Though aware she exists in a barely negotiable present, Anna is too apathetic to change her situation.
Essbaum uses equivocation to convey Anna’s indecision. She is a good wife—mostly. She “loved and didn’t love sex.” Wandering outside during a bout of insomnia, Anna notices the moon, but thinks she has nothing to say about it. However, “in saying that she had nothing to say, somehow said something.”
She frequently notes her love of spouse Bruno is actually love of a version him. Her love is a version of love. When her analyst, Frau Doktor Messerli, asks what she’s good at, Anna “gave a catechumenal answer, born of repetition and praxis.”
“Catechumenal” means a person who is taught rudimentary Christianity, a person who is taught rudimentary facts of any subject. Anna’s catechumnal response? “I don’t know. “
Hausfrau is being hailed as a modern cross between Madame Bovary and Fifty Shades of Gray. While Emma Bovary and Anna Benz share certain similarities, at no time do Anna’s dalliances include nonconsensual BDSM with cheesy villains drafted from the worst possible romance writing. Nor do Hausfrau’s few passages of graphic sex truly place the novel in explicit territory.
Like Emma Bovary, Anna is self-involved and selfish. Both women cuckold their spouses. But Emma Bovary lives in a society where unhappily married females have few options. She cannot pack a valise, rent a cute little studio, and start a business selling handmade tchotchkes on Etsy. Her misery is inescapable.
Anna Benz has plenty of options. She’s a modern woman with a wealthy husband, a college degree, and a degree of freedom. However, to borrow from REM, even as life’s rich pageant opens before her, Anna cannot muster the enthusiasm to say whatever. Or to think about saying whatever, therefore sort of maybe saying something.
The faintest reason for Anna’s trouble would help readers feel a connection instead of growing irritation.Though arguments are made for likable narrators, Anna’s dislikability isn’t the problem. The problem is a lack of explanation for her behavior. Hausfrau, however well built, is constructed over a sinkhole. And that sinkhole has nothing to do but collapse on itself. Before it does, the annoyance mounts.
Essbaum’s website notes her interest in Jungian psychoanalysis. Hence Anna’s analyst, Frau Doktor Messerli. The doktor announces she is not a psychologist, telling Anna she must solve her own problems. Staying well on her side of the desk, she offers an endless stream of analogies.
“A lonely woman is a dangerous woman. “
“Chaos bars the ego from the serenity, the solidity, and the solidarity of the self. “
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you.”
This is all very poetic but unlikely to quell an anxiety attack. Indeed, when Anna needs Frau Doktor Messerli most, the doktor misses her patient’s cues entirely.
Anna, for her part, plies Bruno, Messerli, and her lovers with unanswerable questions. After a steamy bout of intercourse, she asks Bruno, “What’s the purpose of pain? “
Messerli is asked the difference between love and lust, the difference between destiny and fate, the difference between delusion and hallucination. The questioning quickly becomes grating. Like Bruno, the reader wishes Anna would get a grip.
Essbaum’s fondness for unusual metaphors can also confound. Anna’s passivity passes “through the lens of a certain dessicated poignancy.” Elsewhere, there is “metastized wistfulness” and “hysteria’s rancid theatrics”. What, precisely, is a “dessicated poignancy”? Can hysteria be rancid?
When Essbaum doesn’t allow her poet’s ear to get the better of her, a vocabulary enriched by living in two languages — like her character, she spent time in Dietlikon — creates a unique voice. The plot moves smoothly through numerous settings and time frames, creating a complex narrative weave. Setting and scene are marvelous, offering readers an inside view of Swiss life.
Yet Anna Benz’s unexplained stasis ultimately infuriates As a series of unlikely plot events pushes Hausfrau to its sad if predictable conclusion, the reader is left wondering. Essbaum’s Anna Benz may be beyond redemption, but her authorial talents leave room for hope. There is always the next book.