I’ve rarely read a book that gave me so much writer’s envy as Mrs March. From the first page, I kept thinking – I wish I’d written this. There’s not too much I can say about the plot without spoiling some of the novel’s most surprising pleasures, but I’ll try.
Mrs March, preparing for a party to celebrate her husband’s latest novel, discovers that the main character in the novel, an aging prostitute who nobody wants to sleep with, is based on her. This sets off a chain of speculation and increasingly macabre events that leave the reader wound tight as a spring – and Mrs March begins to suspect that her husband, George, may in fact be a murderer. Or is Mrs March going mad? We are distanced from our highly unreliable narrator until the very last page by never knowing her first name. Yet Virginia Feito simultaneously hews us so closely into her protagonists’ perspective that it becomes an act of horror in itself. The prose is spare, hallucinatory, peppered with razor sharp insight. It’s one of the best evocations I have ever read of anxiety, the inner gallop of panic induced by the prospect of making a decision. Mrs March’s gradual transformation over the course of the book is agonising to witness. And it is deeply, deliciously gothic.
In this astonishing debut, the venerable but gossipy New York literary scene is twisted into a claustrophobic fun house of paranoia, horror and wickedly dark humour. George March’s latest novel is a smash. No one is prouder than Mrs. March, his doting wife. But one morning, the shopkeeper of her favourite patisserie suggests that his protagonist is based on Mrs. March herself: “?‘But ... —isn't she ...’ Mrs. March leaned in and in almost a whisper said, ‘a whore?’?” Clutching her ostrich-leather pocketbook, she flees, that one casual remark destroying her belief that she knew everything about her husband—as well as herself. Suddenly, Mrs. March is hurled into a harrowing journey that builds to near psychosis, one that begins merely within the pages of a book but may uncover both a killer and the long-buried secrets of her past.