His Lovely Wife - Hardcover

Dewberry, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151012210 ISBN 13: 9780151012213

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Synopsis

Tall, blond, and beautiful Ellen Baxter is mistaken for Princess Diana by the paparazzi just days before Diana's fatal car crash, and when her Nobel-laureate husband attends a physics conference, she visits the site of the accident, only to find an uncharacteristic photograph of Diana that leads her to the man who shot the photo and on a journey of self-exploration. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Dewberry has written three previous novels, including Sacrament of Lies. Her plays have been produced in a variety of venues. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband, Robert Olen Butler.

Reviews

It's difficult to imagine that anyone interested in all things Diana also wants to ponder the Big Bang and the mysteries of the afterlife in the same sitting. But such is the ambitious reach of Elizabeth Dewberry's fourth novel, His Lovely Wife.

The wife in question is blond, beautiful, 36-year-old Atlanta housewife Ellen Baxter, who, while accompanying her Nobel laureate husband, Lawrence, to a physics conference in Paris, is briefly mistaken by the paparazzi for "Lay Dee Dee." When Ellen's photo is snapped, it's as though not only her image is captured but also her soul, which becomes entwined with Diana's when the princess dies hours later in a car crash. Ellen, profoundly moved, pockets a picture of Diana at the makeshift memorial near the crash site and soon begins channeling her. With a husband as stiff as the cardboard that squares his starched Brooks Brothers shirts, Ellen tracks down a paparazzo who pursued Diana on her final night, hoping he can help her answer some of the questions that Diana, the definitive lovely wife, must have faced in her own empty marriage to an older man.

Although His Lovely Wife starts slowly, it becomes more appealing as Ellen grows as a character. Readers spend a lot of time inside Ellen's head -- when she's not listening to Diana, she has her own interior monologues -- and, especially at first, her mind can be a pretty claustrophobic space. It's easy to relate when she says, "A therapist once called the voice in my head that criticizes everything I do my internalized mother, a different thing from my real mother and my memory mother. We worked for a few months on building an imaginary soundproof vault to lock them all up in and on my fear of getting locked in there with them, all of us screaming our hearts out and nobody being able to hear us." Ellen, in fact, is so self-involved that as she walks along the streets of Paris she hears the sound of her own breathing: "In: Huff. Out: Puff. Huff. Puff. I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down." Her introspection becomes overbearing at times, but her internal struggles with unhappiness will resonate with those who have had their own marital throes.

What saves Ellen as a protagonist is that her mind is also an expansive and intelligent place, her observations wise. On the inevitability of Diana's untimely death, she says: "You either live happily ever after or. . . . What is it that happens to the other people, the stepmothers and stepsisters and wolves and witches? They get pushed into ovens or hacked up by hunters or cast into fiery pits. Once you find yourself in a fairy tale, you either live happily ever after or you die."

By the time Ellen catches up with the photographer Max Kafka and repairs to his studio for a portrait session, one actually hopes he will seduce her -- anything to give this unhappy woman a break. It works. Though readers have no idea how -- or even if -- Ellen will change her life after having spent an afternoon in Max's bed, she returns to her hotel a more centered person. And whatever her fate, she's a character who readers will remember and sympathize with.

Always an attentive wife, Ellen can talk string theory -- the idea that the most basic elements of the universe are neither particles nor waves but tiny vibrating strings of energy -- with her husband's physicist colleagues. She even develops a theory of the afterlife, which she wants to explain to an intimidating female German scientist over omelets and wine: "When people die, spacetime rips open, creating a wormhole through which they travel to the next universe, and then the branes patch up the hole, but every so often, something goes wrong and they don't go through the wormhole when they get the chance, so they get stuck here."

The novel's biggest flaw has less to do with Ellen than with her husband -- or rather his work. Ellen's ruminations about it continually impede the story line. Instead of the Nobel Prize for discovering a black hole, couldn't Lawrence have just won, say, the Pritzker Architecture Prize? That would have spared readers the trial of trying to understand wormholes, alternative universes and what happens when antimatter particles collide with matter particles. No matter what Lawrence's expertise, Ellen's territory would remain the same: the human heart -- as vast and unknowable as the cosmos. And it's hard not to be moved by that.

Reviewed by Linda Kulman
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Beautiful Ellen Baxter is tagging along with her Nobel laureate husband, Lawrence, to a physics conference in Paris when, in a matter of hours, she's mistaken for Princess Diana and then possessed by Diana's just-departed spirit. Ellen has felt unaccomplished, detached, self-deprecating—a "lovely wife" as opposed to a real person. When Diana begins speaking to her from the beyond, Ellen, convinced that they both have lived for and through men, is newly enlivened. The story gains momentum when Ellen decides to pursue a paparazzo she encounters at the site of Diana's accident; her tentative overtures toward Max Kafka intersect with her complex feelings about the princess. When she and Max wind up in bed, Ellen begins to make some sense of her experience with the otherworldly: "It's storming outside, but it feels safe and still and very private here, just Max and Diana and me in this room that's been sealed off from the rest of the world." This perceptive, poignant novel lacks a satisfying conclusion—none of Ellen's conflicts with her past (difficult mother, dead father) or her present (brilliant, remote husband) is resolved—but the channeling of Princess Di lends an interesting new twist to the mid-life wife crisis genre. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In Dewberry's fourth novel (following Sacrament of Lies, 2001), regal blond Ellen is staying at the Ritz in Paris with her physicist husband, Lawrence, in town to attend a conference. Coincidentally, Princess Diana is also staying there, and Ellen is thrilled when the paparazzi lining the street mistake her for Diana. When Ellen learns of Diana's fatal automobile crash, all of her own insecurities about her intellect and her status as "the lovely wife" assail her. Soon she is fending off the condescension of an acerbic female German physicist, a colleague of her husband's, and channeling Diana's voice in her head as she recognizes the parallels between their lives (difficult mothers, remote husbands)--all of which motivates Ellen to seek out a handsome but conflicted American photographer. In one long and sometimes claustrophobic interior monologue, Dewberry attempts to connect string theory with the all-too-familiar facts of Diana's life. In some ways, her ambition outstrips her material, which may feel more compelling to readers who share the narrator's fascination with Diana. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 Princess Diana was declared dead at four a.m., about an hour ago, but I don’t know that yet. I can’t sleep, so I’ve just put on my jogging clothes and slipped out of my room at the Paris Ritz, where I’m staying with my husband. He’s attending a meeting of physicists about black holes and the chaotic order of the universe, and I’m here mostly to shop. Or so I ­think.
 
           I also think Diana’s staying here with her boyfriend and I’m passing their suite. Actually, I’m stopped in front of it. The bodyguard is gone—off duty, I assume—and I don’t want to warm up outside the hotel where I’m expecting two or three hundred paparazzi to be waiting for her as they were yesterday, so I’m standing in front of her double doors, but discreetly separated from them by several feet, and I’m pulling first one arm across my chest, then the other, when I notice there’s no newspaper hanging in a little white plastic bag from her gilded door handles, as there is on ­ours.
 
           I tell myself, —She must be up already, reading her ­paper.
 
           I clasp my hands behind my back, slowly bend forward, and wait, perfectly still, stretching my arms and my legs and straining my sense of hearing. The walls are surprisingly thin here, but there’s not a sound coming from the room, not the turning of a newspaper page, the murmur of a television newscast, no early­-­morning lovemaking. So I assume one of them woke up, got out of bed, grabbed the paper, read the headlines, then went back to ­sleep.
 
           I straighten up, feeling slightly ashamed of myself. Wanting to hear them watch TV was borderline all right, but hoping to listen to them make love is going too far. So I ­leave.
 
           Just before I get to the revolving door in the lobby, I slip on a pair of sunglasses and put on a baseball cap, pulling my ponytail through the hole in the back. I’m thinking that maybe in the dark, with the cap and the sunglasses and photographers who’ve waited up all night to see Diana, I have a shot at being briefly mistaken for her. It happened yesterday, but at the time, I didn’t understand what was going on—I felt like I was under attack—so I want to do it again. It’s a fantasy, a harmless fantasy for a Buckhead housewife on vacation in ­Paris.
 
           But I walk out into silence—not a single photographer is here—and I feel as if I’m the one who’s being stood ­up.
          

I shrug it off, though, and go down to the rue de Rivoli and cross the place de la Concorde. I turn right at the river, where I run along the cours de la Reine, which I’m trying to remember how to translate: —The heart of the queen? Hearts of the queen? The queen’s ­corpse?
 
           —Surely ­not.
 
           After a mile or two, I come to a street that’s closed to motor traffic, though people are stepping over the barricades, walking down the middle of the road toward the entrance to a tunnel, where a small crowd is gathered. The sun isn’t up yet, but the tunnel—the pont de l’Alma underpass, actually—is brightly, almost blindingly lit, and so many cameras are pointed at it that the thought crosses my mind that I’ve wandered onto a movie set. But there’s no director, nobody yelling, Action! or, Quiet. There’s no noise to quiet—no traffic or bustle, no human voices. And the sadness in the people I might have taken to be extras feels all too ­real.
 
           I cross the barricade and move closer to find out what they’re looking at: a huge black Mercedes that’s been crumpled like a wad of ­paper.
 
           I stand for several minutes with a group of strangers, watching the car being hoisted onto the back of a truck. There are no bodies, no ambulances, but it’s obvious that someone has died. Some people are taking pictures, but none of us is saying a word. Everybody’s barely breathing except for one woman in a sari who starts weeping and can’t ­stop.
 
           The flashes from the cameras keep hitting the car and screaming off, and the air is full of a scent that’s not exactly oil or smoke or wet pavement or muddy water or human sweat or the smell of your own skin after you’ve wept, but some combination of all that and something else, something earthy and otherworldly and sorrowful, and I hear a distant sound like musical voices echoing inside a metallic cave, and I feel a tearing in me, a memory starting to rip open: my mother’s gold station wagon with the fake wood paneling on the sides and sleek chrome luggage rack on top, and the last time I saw my father, he was tying my little blue and white vinyl suitcase to the roof with a rope, and the last time I saw the car, in the dark, through the cracks between my mother’s fingers, it looked black, not gold, and it was not a car. I thought it should have been making a noise, a hiss, a steely scream—somebody should have been screaming—but the only sound I could hear was crickets, crying in the night. I didn’t know what had happened—I still don’t remember the crash—and I tried to tell myself the car had exploded like in a cartoon and my father had been ejected and he’d gone for help, he would come back with a little X­-­shaped bandage on his forehead and save the day. Though another part of me knew he was still in the car, and he was dying, or ­dead.
 
           My mother, a former Miss Alabama with a singing ventriloquist act, had been performing at a church in Mobile, after which we’d gone to the beach for a day, and on our way home, late on a starless, moonless night, we’d hit a black bull in the middle of a black country road, and I found myself sitting in the dirt next to the car, hearing my mother call my name. The stuff in my suitcase—books and bathing suits and sundresses—was scattered over the road like so much garbage. My mother held Katie, her dummy, under one arm, and when she found me, she took my hand in her other hand, and I stood up. I didn’t ask about my father and she didn’t say anything about him, and we left our footprints on my things as we walked away from the car and into the black of the night. We never spoke directly of the accident ­again.
 
           And thirty years later, in Paris, I’m trying to put my father’s violent death out of my mind—I don’t think of him that often—as I linger a few more minutes in front of the remains of someone else’s crash. Part of me wishes I could call my mother now, but what would we ­say?
 
           —Hi, Mother, how are ­you?
 
           —Fine.
 
           —Good . . . I’m fine, ­too.
 
           And then ­what?
 
           I can’t get myself to imagine her saying, Ellen! or, How nice to hear from ­you!
 
           But she’d have to say something. She wouldn’t hang up on ­me.
 
           Maybe, —I thought you’d dropped off the face of the ­planet.
 
           I wouldn’t point out that I could have come to the same conclusion about her. I’d just say, —No, I’m still hanging ­on.
 
           A man in a bright blue jumpsuit quietly sweeps up the last of the broken glass. Then a few other men in jumpsuits turn off the floodlights and take them away while another, almost imperceptible odor begins to fade—a combination of sulfur and silver and the way paper smells after whatever was written on it has been erased. I think we would stand here longer, gazing at the empty space where the car was, but men in uniforms are quietly asking people to move off the ­street.
 
           The woman in the sari is moving in the general direction of the drift of people toward the huge fake flame on the plaza above the underpass, a life­-­sized replica of the flame on the Statue of Liberty, and I’m following her. I’m debating whether to try to comfort her or give her some privacy when she crosses a side street ahead of me while the walk signal—a green man with one foot extended in front of him—blinks. Then he changes to red, feet together, and I stop at the curb and she disappears into the ­crowd.
 
           So I’m just waiting to cross the same side street, not headed anywhere in particular, when I hear a cell phone ring and turn to see whose it is and I look at the man standing next to me and he looks at me. He seems familiar, though I can’t place him instantly. He sort of nods at me, though whether it’s because he recognizes me or he’s apologizing for the loud ring, which seems disrespectful under the circumstances, I can’t say. Then he pulls back from the curb and speaks softly into the phone: “Oui?” His voice is familiar, too. He’s standing behind me now, so I can’t see his face, but I ­listen.
 
           He says, “Yes, I’m here,” in English, and his accent is American and I think I remember where I’ve seen him before, and he says with some irritation in his voice, “No, there’s nothing left for me to photograph now, anyway, just a bunch of rubbernecks,” and I know where I saw him. Then he says, quietly but with some disgust in his voice, “Right,” and then, even more quietly, almost a whisper, “Go f*** ­yourself.”
 
           And the walk signal comes on again and we cross the street and I move slowly until he catches up with me and now we’re walking side by side toward the flame. Maybe somewhere in my unconscious, I’m already starting to put things together—the missing newspaper, the silence in Diana’s room, the lack of paparazzi at the hotel and the abundance of them here—and I don’t want to know it. But for whatever reason, I’m not going to ask him who died. I tell myself that’s because I think he’s assumed I already know and I’m grieving, as he is, or at least paying my respects, when what I was actually doing there at the tunnel, I have to admit, was more like rubbernecking. I tell myself I probably won’t recognize the name when I do hear it, assuming the person is French. I try to convince myself that this odd feeling I’ve got in my stomach is about him, an intuition that being Americans in Paris in this particular spot at this particular time of this particular day means we have something important in common. Which will turn out to be true, though not in any way I’m imagining right ­now.

Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth ­Dewberry
 
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Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151012210
• ISBN 13: 9780151012213
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282