We’re perhaps used to the experience of new books and movies that make us realize we’re not as sophisticated as we think we are. But because even those of us who know better like to think that we’re smarter than the past, an older work that challenges our fantasies about our own sophistication can come as a shock.
Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife, reissued by McNally Editions, the in-house publishing arm of the New York City independent bookstore chain McNally-Jackson, comes as a shock. It’s not just the honesty with which Parrott writes about sex and love and the ways in which they do and don’t intersect, it’s that the book makes you wonder how a literary voice this strong, simultaneously astringent and lyrical, could ever have been lost.
Part of the answer is to be found in Marsha Gordon’s fine and welcome new biography Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press): the old tiresome disdain that for years greeted women who took romance as their subject, even if, as Gordon makes plain about Parrott, the author herself was not a romantic. Writing to a lover to plead with him not to leave here, Parrott imagined a future biographer saying, “ ‘The publication of her first book coincided with the final rupture of her heart.’ (Providing he was writing in a sentimental decade that took things that happen to the heart, seriously.)” Think of the space love and sex and relationships occupy in our lives and then think of the way too many female writers who work this terrain are spoken off as if they are tilling a narrow patch of land. (Jhumpa Lahiri’s slim, diamond-hard 2018 novel Whereabouts, as emotionally full an examination of the price you pay for independence, should have been shouted to the skies when it appeared.)
Ex-Wife is the story of twenty-four-year-old Patricia, whose marriage ends after she confesses to an infidelity (she doesn’t confess that it was with her husband’s best friend). Her husband, Peter, who doesn’t object to her working or drinking or smoking, nonetheless acts as if he has been tricked into expending his precious devotion on someone particularly low and sluttish. Nothing about Peter is exceptional, even the type of shit he turns out to be. But that doesn’t keep Patricia from wanting to win him back, even though each time they fall back into bed only confirms to her how little she’s losing. The poignance of Ex-Wife is that even as Patricia comes to realize the false expectations she has about Peter, and about marriage in general, that falsity doesn’t keep her from wanting her idealized notions to be true. She’s no dupe, though. Only occasionally does she give into a bout of self-pity, and she quickly sees it as the kind of slop you indulge in privately and then get over. The book is the story of how Patricia fends for herself in ‘20s New York, both at work and among the men—some just escorts, some lovers, nearly all of them not good enough—she encounters.
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