MY RUSSIAN

A provocative character study of a —mad housewife— at odds with her family and community is the most interesting feature of this ambitious, flawed third novel from the Montana author of Rima in the Weeds (1991) and One Sweet Quarrel (1994). The story’s narrated by Francesca Woodbridge, a former public relations consultant who takes a vacation from her husband Renton (—Ren—) and teenaged son (Mack), while the former is laboriously recuperating after being shot by an unknown burglar. That’s improbability number one. While in Greece, Francesca leaves her tour group (ostensibly for a private trip to nearby islands); fabricates a new identity; then flies back to the States, holing up in a motel not far from her home, and spends a week in disguise, walking about her neighborhood incognito, observing—unrecognized, except by a neighbor’s dog (improbability number two), until a random stabbing incident blows her cover. McNamer’s shuttling narrative juxtaposes Francesca’s intrigue-laden week with fragmented memories of her girlhood, disappointing marriage (to an attorney who evolved from liberal firebrand to spokesman for polluters and calculating social climber), and affairs (most notably with Yuri, their former Russian gardener, who inevitably becomes a prime suspect for that shooting). Francesca returns to Greece, then back home, as expected—but for a surprising climax in which that intruder’s identity is revealed; a corollary to her unillusioned discovery that —exhilaration has virtually nothing to do with loyalty or kindness and everything to do with the experience of your own powers.— This is a curious novel, with an oddly opaque protagonist who doesn’t really know why she acts as she does. Sometimes that’s arrestingly dramatic; more often, it translates as McNamer’s failure to make her believable. McNamer’s edgy, graveyard-witty, borderline-wisecracking voice has its charms, but this time out it’s largely wasted on a character and a situation that are hard to care about.