My Russian - Hardcover

McNamer, Deirdre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395956374 ISBN 13: 9780395956373

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1999

Synopsis

Living in disguise blocks from her home, Francesca Woodbridge, supposedly on a trip to Greece, spends her time spying on her former life, including her husband, a lawyer recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by a mysterious intruder; her teenage son;and her lover, a Russian gardener

About this title

Review:

Francesca Woodbridge's seemingly normal life as wife and mother in a Midwestern town belies a fierce and consuming "desire for desire." Though the narrator of My Russian has suppressed her true nature for many years, when her lawyer-husband, Ren, is shot by a mysterious intruder, she realizes she cannot, like other people, handle her "roiling dreams, morning sweats ... like pets that can be sent back to obedience school." But this is just the latest in a long string of events that have poisoned her domestic life. Years before, Ren abandoned his ideals and took a job with a white-shoe firm, and Francesca is eternally angry at him for it. She begins to transgress--a liaison with a young man, then an affair with her Russian gardener. But it is when she takes a break from tending Ren after the shooting and goes to Greece (only to sneak home and live in disguise at a motel for a week) that her life is altered irrevocably.

Deirdre McNamer's third novel is infused with a deep melancholy rooted in her character's awareness of life's fragility. It is precisely this awareness that forces Francesca to be true to her desire for desire, no matter the outcome. "I'm hoping to channel it into something constructive," she says, "but it's possible that that won't happen. It may be my religion, my way of insisting on the existence of some unseeable truth. It may also be a way of going blind. Of missing what's best when it's right before your eyes." A scary religion, that, but as My Russian makes clear, it's one that Francesca, like the truly faithful, cannot help but obey. --Katherine Anderson

From the Inside Flap:

While her family thinks she is vacationing in Greece, Francesca Woodbridge- disguised by the wig, the dress, and the limp of an elderly woman - checks into a local hotel just blocks from her home. The reason for her deceit is twofold: to step outside of her life and observe it from a distance and to watch the comings and goings in her neighborhood for clues to potential suspects in her husband's shooting.
Ever since the night her husband Ren was wounded by an intruder's gun, Francesca has felt uneasy in their marriage and resentful of how Ren has changed over the years. Now, as an undercover spy on her own life, she scans her history in her unsparing, sometimes darkly funny search for clarity - from the idealistic days of college when she first fell in love, through the quiet disappointments that have collected in the depths of her soul, to her recent, unexpected, passionate affair with her Russian gardener, Yuri, whose sudden, unexplainable disappearance leads her to question just who she has become. As she seeks an answer, she meets people she could never have known in her "real" life and views people she thought she knew as strangers. As she reveals who shot her husband, she is forced to see herself in a bold, new, and entirely unexpected light . . .

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0395956374
• ISBN 13: 9780395956373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278
• Editor: Strachan Pat