FICTION: An emotional affair sparks a rivalry between two married women.
"My Nemesis" by Charmaine Craig; Grove Press (208 pages, $26)
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For fans of Siri Hustvedt and Claire Messud, Craig's third novel, "My Nemesis," is the spiky little feminist page-turner you've been waiting for. Spiky little feminist page-turner? When's the last time you saw those four words in a row? I can explain. But first, some sense of the plot.
Tessa is a New York-based memoirist who falls into an emotional affair with Charlie, a West Coast philosopher. Charlie gets along fine with Tessa's rich, easygoing husband, Milton, but his wife, Wah, is a problem, as is her adopted daughter from Burma, Htet, rescued from human trafficking, now a surly teenager.
Tessa finds Wah both "submissive and queenlike," "a tangle of both deference and hostility," and as the book opens, has informed her, three martinis in at a restaurant, that she is an "insult to womankind." It's going to take most of the book to find out why, so let me move on to defending my adjectives.
First, let's take "spiky." The last time we've seen a narrator this unlikable was ... maybe never, though Tessa strikes notes that recall Julia May Jonas' unnamed protagonist in "Vladimir." Tessa is cold, self-centered, snooty and aggressively intellectual. Perhaps the peak of her off-putting qualities is found in her role as mother. A memory of putting her then-10-year-old daughter to bed: "The entire performance of maternal involvement was on my mind as I put Nora to bed that night." Lord have mercy.
As partial redemption, Craig makes Tessa self-aware to the point of pain: "My essay was written from the perspective of a woman staring down into the abyss of a cynicism that had become too gargantuan to tolerate. There was the wreckage of my first marriage behind me. There was the damage I had caused my daughter — damage whose depths I was only beginning to fathom."
On to "little." "My Nemesis" is 208 pages long, the perfect weekend or airplane read, and just the right length for a book with such an annoying narrator.
"Feminist." The feminism of the novel is interestingly complex and layered, since Tessa's personal version of it is questioned rather than endorsed. While looking at Wah's photo, Tessa points out "the features of dependency and insecurity that my feminism urges me to decry: the wide, wounded gaze; the helpless fragility."
Naturally, self-aware Tessa sees the problem herself: After harshly evaluating another woman's appearance, she accuses herself of anti-feminism, noticing "how merciless women can be in scrutiny of one another and of how far we may go to prove ourselves enough to be liked." This is one of the main themes of the book, whose real feminism is found in its resistance to creating likable female characters.
Now we're down to "page-turner." Craig deals her narrative tricks with a sure hand. Between addressing the novel to a mysterious "you," then dropping this bomb on page 13 — "You have asked me to give an account of what transpired before Wah's death" — but not mentioning the death again for so long that you start to wonder if you misread it, and, not last or least, neglecting to tell us what provoked the "womankind" insult on Page 1 for more than a hundred more pages — well, all I can say is see you on Page 208.
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Marion Winik is a writer and educator in Baltimore.
