If you were to generalise about psychological thrillers – a genre label now applied to pretty much any novel in which someone has a buried secret – you could say that they rely on our fascination with the gulf between civilised appearances and the potential brutality that lurks beneath.
Mrs March, Virginia Feito’s accomplished debut, plays knowingly with these tropes, finely balancing the two aspects of her story – New York comedy of manners and gothic horror – so that each feels like the other’s natural counterpoint. Her heroine, who is only ever referred to by her married title until the final page, is obsessed to the point of paranoia with how she is regarded. Even motherhood is a competitive performance (her husband already has a daughter from his first marriage): “As a way to prove to everyone she could rear an infinitely more gracious and sensitive child, and also as a sort of punishment to Paula, Mrs March herself had a child.”
Marriage to George March, a successful novelist, affords her a degree of status among her Upper East Side neighbours, so that when a woman at her favourite patisserie confidently observes that the main character in George’s new novel – “a whore no one wants to sleep with” – is based on his wife, Mrs March’s ordered world begins to unravel. She starts seeing doppelgangers everywhere; she believes her apartment is infested with cockroaches; she becomes convinced her husband is responsible for the murder of a young girl.
The novel echoes with literary references; there’s an obvious nod to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as we meet Mrs March preparing for a party, and sly winks to Du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith and Hitchcock. Feito’s formal, stylised prose is the perfect vehicle to deliver deadpan black comedy, and the book is often wickedly funny, all the more impressive given that English is not her first language. But the archness also serves to keep the reader at a distance from the characters, so that when the inevitable gruesome climax comes, there is little real feeling involved; in the end, it’s all beguiling surface.
• Mrs March by Virginia Feito is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
