The realism of Anna’s dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel are marvels of the form, and Essbaum chooses her words carefully. In Essbaum’s capable hands, Anna invites the reader’s empathy rather than scorn. Still, she’s drawn into a number of extramarital affairs that skirt the line between passion and passivity. She starts a course of Jungian analysis with the inimitable Doktor Messerli and finally enrolls in language classes. Essbaum’s story opens as Anna attempts to break through her ennui and engage with the world. In her nine years of living in a tidy suburb of Zurich, Anna (whose name is a Tolstoy nod) has never gotten a driver’s license, befriended other mothers, or learned Swiss German, the form of German spoken in Switzerland. Anna Benz is an American expatriate and mother of three, married to Bruno, a Swiss banker. 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.” But now, more than ever, it is clear that the conflict between the protagonist’s desires and her “tightly circumscribed” world is her own doing, and not a result of social limitations.
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