Staff Pick
A scorching character study, along with an examination of infidelity and modern-day ennui, Hausfrau exposes the ease of deceit, the disregard for compassion, and the stifling boredom that can so easily consume. Anna, an American living in Switzerland with her husband and three children, is utterly disengaged from her colorless life. Capricious and erratic, Anna moves from one sticky situation to another and cannot seem to manage her moods or her life. Like a contemporary Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, Hausfrau follows the internal angst and unease of a woman on the brink of disaster. Impeccably written, Jill Alexander Essbaum's novel is a brilliant victory of literary skill. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs
comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality,
featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with
meaning.
Anna Benz, an American in her late
thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno — a banker — and their three
young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a
comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift
and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable
Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse
herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis,
and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises
even her.
But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these
affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions
escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a
moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no
going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision
of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an
unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most
especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and
shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose
passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her
story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves
and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make
to find ourselves.
Review
“Over a century after the publication of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina,
poet Essbaum proves in her debut novel that there is still plenty of
psychic territory to cover in the story of ‘a good wife, mostly.’ . . .
The realism of Anna’s dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel
are marvels of the form. . . . This novel is masterly as it moves
toward its own inescapable ending, and Anna is likely to provoke strong
feelings in readers well after the final page.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
“[Essbaum’s] first foray into fiction has already drawn references to Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.
. . . But the self-alienation of the American wife of a Swiss banker,
resulting in Jungian analysis and reckless serial adultery, feels more
contemporary, subjective, and just plain funny than classical bourgeois
ennui. Imagine Tom Perrotta’s American nowheresvilles swapped out for a
tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German
grammar and European hypocrisy.” New York
Review
“This marvelously quiet book is psychologically complex and deeply
intimate — as sexy as it is sad. . . . Though Anna, as heroine, has
literary precedent, Essbaum has gracefully combined the mundane of the
familial, graphic sex scenes, linguistics lessons and precise passages
of psychological expertise into something utterly original. Essbaum has
written one of the smartest novels in recent memory.” The Dallas Morning News
Review
“Elegant, erotic . . . There is much to admire in [Jill Alexander]
Essbaum’s intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel,
including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present.” Chicago Tribune
Review
“A debut novel about Anna, a bored housewife who, like her Tolstoyan
namesake, throws herself into a psychosexual journey of self-discovery
and tragedy.” O: The Oprah Magazine
Review
“In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.” Time
About the Author
Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of several collections of poetry and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, as well as its sister anthology, The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800-Present.
She is the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and recipient of two NEA
literature fellowships. A member of the core faculty at the University
of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program, she
lives and writes in Austin, Texas.