HOUSEHUSBAND

A first novel whose self-impressed narrator takes on househusbanding with a vengeance and makes a better wife and mother than any woman could.

When his wife Jo accepts a job as a hospital administrator, landscape architect Linc Menner moves with her and their three-year-old daughter, Violet, from California to Rochester, New York. Having agreed to stay home with Violet until he makes his next career move, Linc immediately becomes that supermom most real housewives and mothers hate. He is a wonderful cook, as the recipes included at the end of several chapters seem intended to prove. He keeps the house immaculately clean, cleaner than the average housewife does (as he more than once says with some pride), and he fills the high-ceilinged, many-windowed rooms of the house with plants. (Cynical readers may wonder about astronomical heating bills for those curtainless rooms in upstate New York, but money never becomes an issue in this family.) Precocious, adorable, and beautifully behaved Violet is proof of Linc’s extraordinary parenting skills since, as he points out, Jo has little input. Linc does miss adult companionship—especially since the other stay-at-home moms shun him for being a man—until he becomes friends with his neighbor Marilyn. Although she’s attractive and obviously attracted to him, he stays loyal to Jo, who appreciates Linc’s domestic efforts even while she does resent them a little. Besides, Marilyn lets her kids eat junk food and watch too much TV, issues about which the much more strict Linc is a stickler. In fact, the first hint that the new babysitter is evil occurs when she commits the unpardonable sin of giving Violet a Malibu Barbie. Linc struggles to maintain his masculinity as he identifies increasingly with the wives and mothers in his life. He succeeds, naturally, with Jo’s second pregnancy emerging as the physical proof.

Women readers (and what male would read this book?) will want to strangle Linc by his story’s self-congratulatory end.