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The Bitch in the House may be having an adulterous affair.
Cathi Hanauer, who edited the provocative 2002 essay collection subtitled 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, has returned with a novel, Sweet Ruin. It explores what happens when a Gen X wife and mother goes off the rails.
At 35, Elayna lives in New Jersey with her precocious 6-year-old daughter, Hazel, and husband, Paul. She edits a poetry magazine from home. Mostly, however, she grieves for her newborn son, who died of a heart malformation two years earlier. A young male neighbor shows heated interest in Elayna. With her workaholic husband in the city almost 24/7, trouble beckons.
Some aspects of Hanauer's novel are poorly rendered. The one-dimensional husband Paul, for example. The soul-grinding toll of supporting a family by laboring as a Manhattan lawyer is glossed over.
But when Hanauer knows her material, Sweet Ruin can be very good. Hazel is one of the best-written children in recent fiction. She is a real human being, funny, manipulative, not a cut-out from a Gap Kids ad.
The self-absorbed Elayna's relationship with her father is just as complicated. A worldly fashion photographer with serious boundary issues, dear old Dad deserves his own novel. He is both creepy and compelling, casting his cool appraising eye on his daughter and granddaughter's faces and bodies. Hanauer skillfully handles the gray areas of emotional incest in all its weird permutations.
Sweet Ruin
By Cathi Hanauer
Atria, 323 pp., $24
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