'Still Life with Husband' by Lauren Fox

At times predictable, this story of settling for and settling down draws you in

By Jenny Choi
Published: March 27th, 2007 | 10:30am

Lauren Fox tackles the well-trod topic of infidelity in her debut novel, Still Life with Husband, managing to infuse it with fresh insight for a generation of thirty-something women afraid of settling down. Emily Ross is a 30-year-old freelance writer whose day job consists of editing manuscripts for a medical journal about male reproduction; her boss is, amusingly enough, named Dick. As it happens, her college sweetheart husband Kevin is the steadfastly reliable type who reads Sound Investments for the Careful Planner for fun and writes manual instructions for a living. Kevin is fixated on having a baby and buying a house in the suburbs. Along comes David Keller, an attractive, charming editor for the city weekly, and soon enough, we're helplessly consigned to read on as Emily gradually--and deliberately--loses her grasp on the good-girl life she's led until now.

At the core of Fox's novel is not so much the swirl of chaos that ensues, though the narrative itself is propulsive, even if its plot components are, at times, improbable and formulaic. Not to mention, the supporting characters, especially the male ones, feel somewhat like stock composites. But Emily's inner musings and mechanisms for coping with the implications of her actions give the novel a dimensionality that lacks in other areas. She plugs away at a collection-in-progress of love poems dedicated to fish entitled Sole Mates. And in another instance, she thinks, "I'm standing in front of a high school orchestra that is my life, waving my hands madly, trying to get the oboes to stay on key, the trombones to come in on cue. Everything is out of control. But if I close my eyes, it's music I hear." She doesn't divulge her secret to anyone, not even her best friend Meg (who has her own devastation of a miscarriage to cope with), and consequently, the melodrama of her mental dialogue becomes justifiable.

Fox is an adept writer with witty, nuanced insight into her heroine and no shortage of metaphorical allusions that range from clever to cliché. When Emily first finds herself in David's apartment nervous and knowing full-well the guilt-laden sex that is about to transpire, the narrative is replaced with a science textbook-like extraction on earthquakes: "What causes the earth to move under our feet? The answer is energy. Sometimes pieces of the earth's crust may break off when they are under enormous stress... Even if there was recently an earthquake along a fault line, more are likely to follow. Earthquakes can cause serious damage, sometimes in unpredictable ways." Still Life With Husband, despite its visible fault lines, sheds compelling light on a modern young woman who doesn't ask for our sympathy but, nonetheless, somehow manages to elicit it.

Knopf, $22.95, List Price: 272 pages