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LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD Breakup:
The End of a Love Story
Suppose your spouse of 18 years turned out to be not only shallow and narcissistic but a lying cheat as well. For your own stability, the best move would probably be to leave, but for myriad reasons--children, deluded hope, lack of self-respect or force of habit--you might just keep trying to make a go of it. After months of inexplicable domestic chill, the discovery of a handful of hotel receipts and a page torn from an appointment book put novelist Catherine Texier in that position, confirming her suspicions that her husband was having an affair. The protracted misery that followed is the subject of Breakup: The End of a Love Story. Texier was born and raised in France and now lives in New York; appropriately enough, she reacts to her husband's infidelity with a mixture of Gallic aplomb and obsessive neurosis. Despite her anger and pain, which she communicates well, she stays with him, resenting yet tolerating his increasingly overt visits to his mistress. There is, after all, their lingering sexual chemistry: Their sex life continues, like a decapitated chicken going for a few more laps around the barnyard, for two-thirds of the book. It wanes amid her insistent rage and growing resolve, and after a few more grueling months, she finally kicks him out. Texier's account is presented in the form of a diary, and like most diaries, it is rich with quotidian detail. "This morning, when I empty the dishwasher, the pastel-colored Fiestaware sings in the gray light of a rainy morning. The café au lait in the bowl tastes of France." On another day, she writes, "This morning at the Union Square greenmarket I had the blues while I was buying eggs and chicken and filling my straw basket with Winesap apples fresh-picked upstate." No doubt her intent is to create a placid setting to heighten the darkness and violence of her emotions, or to share the little things that keep her steady, but it doesn't quite work. Instead, it comes off as precious and self-indulgent. Combined with lines such as "I touch myself and come twenty times in a row in a frenzy of erotic fantasy, dripping wet," her homey touches have a bizarre effect, like a letter from Martha Stewart to Penthouse Forum. Reading Breakup is like watching a horror movie: "Get out of the house!" you want to scream at the heroine, but you know she's headed straight for the basement, where the creepy noises are coming from. Texier went through a lot, and it is a relief when the abusiveness inherent in her husband's conduct finally begins to dawn on her. But that realization is too little, too late. Harrowing as her story is, it verges on tedium; we can only nod in weary agreement when she writes, "No end to this story. No end at all." --James McQuillen originally published August 26, 1998 |
