You can tell right away that the poet Jill Alexander Essbaum’s first novel is intended as a latter-day Madame Bovary with a dash of Anna Karenina: adultery, trains and the notion of jumping in front of one all come up in the first three pages. Essbaum (pictured) gets straight down to business: “Anna was a good wife, mostly.” When we meet Anna Benz, the bored, trapped wife of a Credit Suisse middle manager and mother of three, she is well established in her adulterous career. But her setup seems at odds with the early 21st-century era in which the story is set: she is American, and after nine years living in a small town outside Zurich, she still has no driver’s licence, no bank account, only a rudimentary command of German (let alone Schwiizerdütsch) and no real friends. Illicit sex is her only outlet or pastime.
There is no mistaking the novel’s claustrophobic mood: we move from awkward family scenes to stolen hours in men’s apartments, via the neat Swiss trains – which “really do run on time”. In between come snatches of Anna’s sessions with her Jungian analyst (“Vhat dooo yooo sink, Anna?”); indeed, without the 19th-century trappings of the source material, Anna’s troubles tend more towards a mid-20th century “problem that has no name”. Of course, many women are still constrained by circumstance, but given Anna’s income bracket it does seem mysterious why her life should be quite so circumscribed. “A modern woman needn’t be so unhappy,” says the analyst. “You should go more places and do more things.” Anna’s passivity is hard to account for. She asks her analyst and a local priest about predestination, but it’s clear that neither God nor society has the grip on her that they had in, say, Tolstoy – they can no longer power a plot like this, so only character is left to generate the momentum.
Anna is as bored as Emma Bovary, but unlike Emma, who can’t accept her life’s ordinariness and seeks out extravagant fantasy instead, Anna doesn’t read novels or, for the most part, romanticise her love affairs. If anything, she lacks imagination. The analyst wonders if her married life is simply replicating a boring pattern: “You have described your parents,” she notes when Anna tells her about her polite, reserved, liberal background. “You’ve also described the Swiss.” Whether out of restlessness or misery, Anna keeps repeating the same errors until, as the analyst puts it, “there’s no need to seek out these mistakes. For now it is they who seek you.” But still, it is hard to narrate a downfall without the usual inexorable forces to drive it. Since Anna could go wherever she likes, it seems a rather transparent plot device – or certainly a gift to her analyst – for her to dump her boyfriend at the zoo on the very day of her son’s school trip there.
There is also a little too much heavy‑handed symbolism in a book that draws so clearly on Flaubert’s archetypal realist novel. We learn that Anna’s first affair was with Stephen, a pyrologist, and are privy to their pillow talk about arson and other flammable topics. Then there are the many possibilities for metaphor afforded by language learning: “But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect?” Anna meets her Scottish lover Archie in German class, and his mistakes are telling: “He was terrible with possessives. It didn’t matter what belonged to whom. All was free to use.”
Essbaum is often more restrained than this, but she cannot solve the book’s central problem: small-town Swiss life here feels like a handy metaphor, not a full social web that can shape and trap an individual Anna makes poor decisions, and bad things happen to her, but there’s no real cause for either, or link between the two. Perhaps that’s a realist move in itself, but there’s a reason novels used not to do it that way.
