Novel About My Wife

Publishers Weekly

The lives of a London couple about to have their first child unravel in Perkins's haunting third novel. In the wake of surviving a train derailment, pregnant Ann Wells tells her husband, struggling screenwriter Tom Stone, that a man has been following her. With only Ann's vague description, the police can do little and Tom attempts to reassure his wife about her safety. As her due date approaches, Ann turns her attention to scouring the house and molding clay "guardian" figures, while Tom searches for work. Finally, Tom agrees to approach a popular television writer and fellow train accident survivor, Simon Wright, for work. After the birth of their son, Arlo, Ann's behavior grows more disturbing, and Tom realizes too late the truth behind her fears. Perkins's gamble to reveal Ann's fate in the early pages pays off; the suspense mounts with each added detail, until everything falls into place in an unsettling climax. Throughout, both Tom and the reader struggle to find a moment when everything could have been prevented. (Aug.)

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Kirkus Reviews

The fourth book of fiction by Perkins (Leave Before You Go, 2000, etc.) is a smart, scary combination of neo-Gothic and comedy of manners, set in contemporary London. Ann, a maker of plaster medical molds, and her husband Tom, a struggling screenwriter, have just moved into a house in a scruffy but up-and-coming neighborhood. Ann, pregnant with their first child, seems manic and eccentric of late. But Tom, who's fighting his own battles with prospective fatherhood, a faltering career and looming poverty (of the bourgeois kind), attributes the changes in her-a fridge full of foul-smelling herbal remedies, frenzies of organizing and redecorating, the tendency to see pests and vermin everywhere, web searches about ghosts-to hormonal swings and to their new, slightly dodgy surroundings. The most sinister manifestation of trouble is the skinny, shaggy man who seems to be following Ann. She spots this hooded figure at the hospital where she works, lingering in the street before the house, even in the back garden-and Tom's anxiety for her is only heightened when, trapped at a park gate while jogging, he's mugged by a band of toughs. Gradually he comes to realize that the elusive menace-no one else ever sees him-may be a figment of his wife's imaginings. The reader learns early on that Ann is dead, and the book-hence its title-is a retrospective attempt to make sense of her end. Perkins grants her bereaved narrator a bitter, plain-spoken colloquial voice, and the book provides great psychological acuteness and mordant humor. But the apparatus can be clumsy, especially the intercut typescript scenes from the disastrous trip to Fiji on which Tom and Ann were married. And Tom withholds a crucialfillip of information about Ann's past for a dramatic effect that seems a wee bit cheap. Not perfect, but pungently observed, suspenseful and often funny. Agent: Georgia Garrett/AP Watt