The title never stands. Throughout the writing process for all my novels, I have come up with wordy, pithy, derivative and/or (after consulting poetry anthologies and even the Bible) a list of what I consider to be highly intriguing sets of words.
All rejected, politely, of course by the powers that be.
The trick, I know well, is to attract the attention of the browsing reader, to entice him or her to pluck the book from the coruscating displays on the bookshop shelf – not to speak of convincing publishers’ marketing departments that they can get it to that bookshop shelf in the first place. It always turns out, however, that I have wasted my energy. Credit where credit is due, though, it’s almost always someone within the publishing empire who comes up with the clicker – The Winter Gathering last time; this time, The Husband. Thank you, Hachette!
In my defence, I did come up with one accepted suggestion: Falling for a Dancer. But I had nicked this from a newspaper headline over a ballet review…
Anyhow, to the subject matter of this new novel, The Husband, which is an exploration of how a woman in her thirties, settled in marriage to a calm, kind, generous and really caring husband, could desert him in short order for an Irish doctor, who exudes switch-on, switch-off charm but also a whiff of danger. Why, having no history of risk-taking, would she take this one? And having made the move, what does she begin to find out about this new guy? And what happens then?
Chicagoan Marian Lescher has had a less than stellar career as a journalist. Due largely to her position as an only child faced with the responsibility of caring for ageing and ailing parents, she can’t dedicate uninterrupted time, or prioritise the ambition, drive and discipline necessary to court success in that very competitive profession. As we meet her, she is, personally and professionally, resigned to the continuation of an uneventful life.
Hah! Fate has other plans for this woman, who lives with her lovely husband in a gorgeous, heart-of-Chicago 64th-floor apartment where planes on final approach to O’Hare and Midway airports glide through her bird’s-eye view of a glittering Lake Michigan. One afternoon, she is at home, with local TV chattering at her in the background, when she hears an Irish accent. She turns up the volume. She sees Daniel Lynch…
Nothing up to now has signalled that this woman could, or would, respond to a coup de foudre, love at first sight in French – and in literature, translated, literally, as a strike from a lightning bolt. And this sudden, inexplicable sexual passion does feel shocking. She struggles to cope with it, but not for long.
What causes her to throw up her good lifestyle and not least the love of a good man, because of what might seem to any sensible person to be a lustful whim? And why does she yield to this man’s wishes that she go with him to live in a half-derelict nine-bedroom house in a tiny village, also half-derelict, in the damp midlands of Ireland? Is this logical? Can this happen?
It can and does. Frequently there is nothing logical about human behaviour, which is why the careers of psychotherapists flourish. Why does the sun shine? Why do the tides advance and recede? Science and logic explain both. Science tries to explain sexual attraction: synapses fire, pheromones collide, humans respond – but not all in the same way. Sexual passion frequently trumps logic and common sense. This is what is at the core of The Husband.
It’s is my 13th novel – there have been non-fiction books and other forms of writing laced through the parade – and the writing of it lived up to common superstition so I should have been more alert to that. I initially delivered it at a rambling 160,000 words due to my customary fascination with the lives of characters who pop up in the writing but don’t make the cut for the plot! I can never resist giving lives of their own to these interlopers until they are. correctly. shown the door by others less attached to them than I. In my first novel, A Place of Stones, the function of a postman in the plot was to deliver a particular letter. But I gave him a name: John-a-Honda, so called in the village because of his trusty 50- horsepower steed, which, naturally, was rusting. I described his appearance. I had him worried about his wife’s cancer. I gave him dialogue. Luckily, my first editor at Macmillan, Jane Wood, sternly moved him on so my heroine simply got the letter and read it… A lesson understood and remembered, but not fully practised, obviously, given that 160,000 words.
Like many authors (I suspect) when, finally, I approach end game in writing a novel, I panic, in that I believe I’ll never, ever , “see” either another character of interest or an intriguing incident worthy of exploration. I try to suppress this fear because, after all, the current book continues to need me to prop it up in the race to the finish.
This panic attack has pounced at the same point of every story I’ve ever written but I don’t seem to learn. I finish the book, I deliver. I co-operate with the editing gallery of “fresh eyes” while simultaneously formulating apologies for the writing genie’s desertion.
The novel is published. Even as I don the glad rags to celebrate its birth, I am buffing the patina on the apologies; I am mentally organising the phrases with which to deliver them. Then a few weeks later, just as I’m about to confess, I discover that a little tickle has begun somewhere at the back of the brain. And there it is, The Next Idea. It’s a miracle!
The Husband by Deirdre Purcell is published by Hachette Ireland
