The End of the Fairy Tale
With Princess Diana's spirit trapped in her head, a physicist's wife searches for love in the universe.
HIS LOVELY WIFE
A Novel
  (From The Book Jacket) |
By Elizabeth Dewberry
Harcourt. 282 pp. $24
It's difficult to imagine that anyone interested in all things Diana also wants to ponder the Big Bang and the mysteries of the afterlife in the same sitting. But such is the ambitious reach of Elizabeth Dewberry's fourth novel, His Lovely Wife .
The wife in question is blond, beautiful, 36-year-old Atlanta housewife Ellen Baxter, who, while accompanying her Nobel laureate husband, Lawrence, to a physics conference in Paris, is briefly mistaken by the paparazzi for "Lay Dee Dee." When Ellen's photo is snapped, it's as though not only her image is captured but also her soul, which becomes entwined with Diana's when the princess dies hours later in a car crash. Ellen, profoundly moved, pockets a picture of Diana at the makeshift memorial near the crash site and soon begins channeling her. With a husband as stiff as the cardboard that squares his starched Brooks Brothers shirts, Ellen tracks down a paparazzo who pursued Diana on her final night, hoping he can help her answer some of the questions that Diana, the definitive lovely wife, must have faced in her own empty marriage to an older man.
Although His Lovely Wife starts slowly, it becomes more appealing as Ellen grows as a character. Readers spend a lot of time inside Ellen's head -- when she's not listening to Diana, she has her own interior monologues -- and, especially at first, her mind can be a pretty claustrophobic space. It's easy to relate when she says, "A therapist once called the voice in my head that criticizes everything I do my internalized mother, a different thing from my real mother and my memory mother. We worked for a few months on building an imaginary soundproof vault to lock them all up in and on my fear of getting locked in there with them, all of us screaming our hearts out and nobody being able to hear us." Ellen, in fact, is so self-involved that as she walks along the streets of Paris she hears the sound of her own breathing: "In: Huff. Out: Puff. Huff. Puff. I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down." Her introspection becomes overbearing at times, but her internal struggles with unhappiness will resonate with those who have had their own marital throes.
What saves Ellen as a protagonist is that her mind is also an expansive and intelligent place, her observations wise. On the inevitability of Diana's untimely death, she says: "You either live happily ever after or. . . . What is it that happens to the other people, the stepmothers and stepsisters and wolves and witches? They get pushed into ovens or hacked up by hunters or cast into fiery pits. Once you find yourself in a fairy tale, you either live happily ever after or you die."
By the time Ellen catches up with the photographer Max Kafka and repairs to his studio for a portrait session, one actually hopes he will seduce her -- anything to give this unhappy woman a break. It works. Though readers have no idea how -- or even if -- Ellen will change her life after having spent an afternoon in Max's bed, she returns to her hotel a more centered person. And whatever her fate, she's a character who readers will remember and sympathize with.
Always an attentive wife, Ellen can talk string theory -- the idea that the most basic elements of the universe are neither particles nor waves but tiny vibrating strings of energy -- with her husband's physicist colleagues. She even develops a theory of the afterlife, which she wants to explain to an intimidating female German scientist over omelets and wine: "When people die, spacetime rips open, creating a wormhole through which they travel to the next universe, and then the branes patch up the hole, but every so often, something goes wrong and they don't go through the wormhole when they get the chance, so they get stuck here."
The novel's biggest flaw has less to do with Ellen than with her husband -- or rather his work. Ellen's ruminations about it continually impede the story line. Instead of the Nobel Prize for discovering a black hole, couldn't Lawrence have just won, say, the Pritzker Architecture Prize? That would have spared readers the trial of trying to understand wormholes, alternative universes and what happens when antimatter particles collide with matter particles. No matter what Lawrence's expertise, Ellen's territory would remain the same: the human heart -- as vast and unknowable as the cosmos. And it's hard not to be moved by that. ·
Linda Kulman is a Washington-based freelance writer.
