Then and now

In Charlotte Mendelson’s caustically brilliant fifth novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), Lucia Hanrahan, the put-upon wife of a domineering male artist, struggles to forge her own identity both creatively and sexually. An affair with a married female MP provides light relief and a potential new future, depending on whether Lucia can do what no one else will and save herself.

In Mendelson’s new novel, Wife, we find the protagonist, Zoe Stamper, in a similar quandary, albeit with a key difference: her overbearing partner, Penny, is female. It is 2.47pm on an undefined day in June 2014. “So now she is Lucifer”, reads the opening line of a seven-page prologue that appears to cast Zoe as the villain in her own deteriorating relationship. An academic in her early forties, Zoe is heading into a building to meet a “Consultant in Couples Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy” for what will turn out to be a mediation session. “It’s complicated. You might have heard? We are, very sadly, we’re sp–”, Zoe tells an acquaintance she bumps into on her way in. “I’ve gathered bits, obviously”, the woman replies.

Before Mendelson reveals how Zoe and Penny have landed up needing mediation, she casts us back to December 1996. “See the embryonic woman, the ridiculous adult-child, on her way to a stranger’s house, already hoping for too much”, urges our arch, omniscient narrator. It is Zoe’s first Arts Faculty social gathering; she is heading to the flat of Dr Penelope Cartwright, who lives there “with her female … what word did people use? Partner? Lover. She was called Justine, apparently something in newspapers”. Zoe is new both to London and to her sexuality. “She’d bought Time Out for the Gay and Lesbian column, memorising venues like holy sites; bravely gone to see one subtitled comic Catalan film on Shaftesbury Avenue; owned a k.d. lang CD.”

From the scene at Dr Cartwright’s – soon to be Penny’s – party, Mendelson flips forwards to that ill-fated day in June 2014, which starts with Zoe waking up on a sofa bed in the living room of the flat she and Penny share. Chapters alternate between “Then” and “Now”, until the two time frames almost converge. It is a neat structure that lends itself well to reliving a relationship breakdown, though the strongest sections bookend the couple’s disintegrating life together. When, during the novel’s third part (“Destruction”), the narrator laments that “They’d had a difficult year; then began another”, and it is still only 2006, narrative time seems to be standing still.

Mendelson revels in the messiness of familial relations, especially the ugly dramas that take place behind closed doors. And families don’t come much messier than the Stamper-Cartwrights once Zoe and Penny get together, which happens at breakneck speed. (Of Zoe’s hurtle into lesbianism, Mendelson writes: “Later, she’d say it was like hitting a piñata; one little tap and out it all fell”.) As she hits thirty-five Penny finds her biological clock sounding its alarm. Mendelson handles the conception with great verve and suspense, dripping out her plot points. The two daughters who follow, Rose and Matilda, cement their father and his sister as central characters, complicating the family, adding thematic depth and calling for four chairs in the mediator’s office.

Wife’s dialogue is sparkling and Mendelson is consistently amusing, whether describing Zoe’s parents home town (“‘near Oxford’ but, spiritually, Headington was more like Buckinghamshire: hair salons and Rotary-club-sponsored flower beds, resentment, inertia”) or Zoe’s initial passion for Penny, their fumblings falling short of “complete sex, because Penny was still trying to be faithful, ‘though,’ she’d say, ‘given the absence of penises, who’s to say where fucking begins and heavy petting ends?’”. Although Zoe comes in for her own share of deprecation – she is overwrought and uptight – Mendelson has created, in Penny, a character so awful that it is hard to see how Zoe could endure her for so long. This ultimately distracts from the broader themes and feels recycled, given that Lucia Hanrahan’s husband, Ray, was also a bully.

It also renders ineffectual the author’s attempt to stress that there are two sides to every story. Yes, “there are unreliable narrators in real life, not only in fiction. It is amazing how few people realize this” – but Penny is too selfish, too unkind, for us to suspend our belief for quite so many pages that Zoe would do anything other than, at the first opportunity, run for the hills.

Susie Mesure is a freelance book critic, interviewer and feature writer

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