Attachment
by Isabel Fonseca
Vintage, HK$256
Isabel Fonseca writing a novel from the perspective of a betrayed wife is like Monica Lewinsky complaining about the dry-cleaning bill. Once dismissed as a 'London socialite', Fonseca was known as 'Funseeker' for her appetites and was recently referred to in The New York Times as a 'homewrecker'. Fonseca was an intimate of philosopher Antonia Phillips when she began an affair with Phillips' husband, Martin Amis.
It would be years before Amis married his mistress. Fonseca is now sombre and hawkish and it is not difficult to see her leading character, Jean Hubbard, as a mask. Mark, Hubbard's advertising executive spouse, is like Amis in his ways and the narrative is rumoured to be a palimpsest of their marriage.
Promoted as reaching 'into the most confounding precincts of the human heart', Attachment unfolds with a discovery: Jean opens 'a lover's letter' addressed to her husband. She is outraged: playfulness has no place in her universe of tombstones and mammograms. The missive upon which the plot pivots is implausible and sounds like a framework for a wronged wife to interpolate her sexualised contempt for her husband. The supposed mistress too is ludicrous, a pornographic pantomime of a human being and - like just about every other woman in the book with the exception of Jean - one-dimensional.