LOVE AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS

A wife and mother wages an emotional cold war against her unfaithful husband.

Family therapist Shumas (Five Things I Can’t Live Without, 2007) plumbs the more unpleasant depths of her trade for this overly familiar but emotionally disconcerting domestic drama. Eve and Jonathon, the couple soon to be at odds, seem perfectly content as the novel opens on a traditional Thanksgiving at home, where they’re celebrating familial togetherness with five-year-old Jacob, and friends and family. It’s quite a jolt to the Norman Rockwell scene when 30-year-old Eve, just shy of delivering their second child, discovers her husband whispering behind a closed bedroom door to an unknown party on the phone: “Shhh, you’re going to be okay. This day will be over soon. And you’ll be fine.” It soon emerges that Eve’s beloved hubby has been carrying on the proverbial “emotional affair” with Laney, a lonely singleton in Chicago who wants to jump Jon’s bones but otherwise serves as little more than an excuse for Eve to unleash her suppressed fury. What follows is a plethora of circular debate among girlfriends over what does or doesn’t constitute cheating, an underutilized subplot that finds Eve’s brother serving as substitute midwife and subsequent nanny, and a series of deeply uncomfortable fights between the aggrieved parties. While Jon sinks into a sad portrait of the dumped husband living in urban squalor, Eve hacks into her husband’s e-mail account to obsess over his infidelities, explores her career options and leaps a little too wholeheartedly into a genuine physical affair with a mentor, Ray Dubrovnik. “I want to learn about me,” she tells her professorial bedmate. “What I like. What I’m capable of.”

What readers get out of the experience will depend largely on how much sympathy they can generate for Eve’s largely self-created drama.