Anatomy of a marriage (The Behaviour of Love in original version), the second novel by Virginia Reeves after the A job like any other follows for ten years, from 1971 to 1981, the evolution of a couple of thirty settled in Boulder (Montana) where the doctor husband Edmund Malinowski, promoted director of the psychiatric establishment of the city, convinced not without difficulty his wife Laura to follow him. In this Montana landscape that the wife, painter, judges “ too big, too majestic, too wild, too deserted “, The threat takes the face of Penelope, a 16 year old teenager, interned for epileptic seizures. Doctor Ed devotes individual therapy sessions to this brilliant young girl that are beyond his remit. Ambitious and charismatic, the psychiatrist who believes in the possibility of reintegration of patients struggles to impose new methods of care and transform this institution without means. He offers his young patient to run a book club, while his wife, who works in secret as a saleswoman in a clothing store, is involved in an art workshop, less to support her husband in his therapeutic process. than to have an eye on him. Laura’s subjective point of view, more clairvoyant than her however ” behavioral psychologist Of husband, alternates with a distant story in which we see this man, accustomed to imposing his decisions, absorbing himself in his mission, ignoring alerts, more attentive to his work than to his marriage, to the point of not realize for several weeks of the pregnancy of his wife. That this story ends badly, we have a feeling from the start. The fall will be more unexpected.
Marital crisis, brief and intense crises of ” little evil »Which strike down without explanation Penelope, identity crisis …, Virginia Reeves finely dissects the implacable process, the lies, the blindness which turns to impotence. Subtly, the novelist not only observes the dislocation, the way in which sometimes the ambiguity of intentions, as much as the passage to action, is enough to trigger irreversible mechanisms. But also the recomposition of feelings and how love behaves unpredictably.
Virginia Reeves
Anatomy of a marriage Translated from English (United States) by Carine Chichereau
Stock
Edition: 9,000 copies.
Price: € 22.90; 432 p.
ISBN: 9782234088245
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