Whether she’s delivering farce or marital wisdom, Shapiro–whose first novel was the well-received “After Moondog”– is as absurdist as Jeanette Winterson and as acerbic as Lorrie Moore. To our narrator, a witty and agonizingly self-conscious photographer who’s more comfortable recording life than living it, marriage is a performance. “I encouraged in myself, and began to rehearse, the attitude of the wise wife: implacable detached amusement commingled with dogged acceptance.”
Her detachment can actually be measured–it’s the distance between her camera and her husband. She shoots every daily mess, every bump and fall. Dennis may be the clumsiest man alive, but, she reflects, maybe she’s the real monster, counting and cataloguing his sins. As Dennis tells her, “You’re telling bad stories about me.” He’s right. It’s her story to tell, and he’s trapped in it. Reflected in her lens, he’s made clumsier every day.
The story falters when our narrator hires a novelist who moonlights as a hit man. (It’s an overdetermined bit of casting–so now all storytellers are murderers?) Also, there are inevitable taste and tonal problems in a comic novel bristling with red flags for spousal abuse: our narrator loses all her friends, her husband warns her not to leave. Shortcomings aside, Shapiro’s surreal tragicomedy tells the real story of a bad marriage–how two people can turn each other into monsters; how a whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts that it can gobble them up until there’s nothing left.
