Felix Quinn’s life is devoted to masochistic curiosity. ‘Contrary to what the great man said, all happy families are not alike,’ he tells us (as a narrator he is prone to self-justification and literary allusion): happiness for the Quinns means Felix manoeuvring his wife, Marisa, into the vicinity of a hunky man and then fading expectantly into the background. He turns up late to their dance lessons, hoping to find her tangoing ‘like a mare in heat’ with a stallion of an instructor, or he invites a distant relation to stay, but makes sure he has work to catch up on in the evening while she entertains the handsome youth. Whatever Marisa may think of this, Felix sees himself and his wife as sexual adventurers. His obsession is ‘eroticised fidelity’, while she, reciprocally, is a married libertine: ‘She followed her fancy, drank hard, declined motherhood with fervour, doted on no man, and wasn’t averse to being looked over in the street. Only in actuality was she kept as more feminine, less ambitious women had been kept for centuries.’ Actuality is a minimal distraction, thanks to the Quinns’ acutely civilised circumstances. They exist in the rarefied space of the classical adultery-novel, never more than a few hundred yards from ‘everything the soul and body of man requires: art galleries, concert halls, good restaurants, suppliers of wine and cheese, infirmaries, bordellos’.
Cape | hardback
308 pp. |ISBN:
9780224086097
