Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna Benz is the hausfrau of the title: an American expat living in Switzerland with her Swiss husband and three children. Ditelikon, in Zurich, is the “tiny town in which Anna’s own tiny life is led” and at every turn, we see how constricted her existence is. The limits placed on her freedom are not simply due to her responsibilities as a housewife, however: her world is circumscribed by the fact that she has neither a bank account nor a driving licence.

Although she is only 37, Anna feels her life has stagnated and compares herself unfavourably with younger Swiss mothers who are “milky and buoyant in places where Anna felt curdled and sunken.” Her passivity is disturbing and there is a terrible sense of foreboding when we are told “vulnerability is a magnet that always attracts assault.”

There is a suggestion that Anna may just be able to rescue herself: she attends psychoanalysis and a German language class. It is questionable, however, why it has taken her 9 years of living in Switzerland to finally attempt to learn German. Her inability to master the language means that she relinquishes dozens of tasks to her husband, including even the filling in of her residency permit. It is not just bureaucracy that excludes Anna, however: the Swiss, including the mothers at the school-gates, speak Schweizerdeutsch – a language that “leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape.” Far more serious than the way it sounds, is the fact the Schweizerdeutsch is “impervious to all outside attempts to learn it”.

Anna is vaguely aware that she is not a liberated woman: in some areas of Switzerland, women did not get the vote until the 1970s and Anna “knew she had been in Switzerland too long when this stopped appalling her.” It takes her psychoanalyst to point out that – aside from her mobile phone, her clothes and her manner of speech – “there was little to distinguish her from a woman who lived fifty, seventy, one hundred years earlier”. Doktor Messerli is repeatedly at pains to demonstrate to this particular patient that her lack of volition is a choice.

In an attempt to assert her own agency, Anna has several lovers. She is so desensitised, however, that she seems to feel very little about these flings. The first of these adulterous relationships is an intense love affair. After it ends, Anna writes the man in question letters she does not send. In one, she confesses “I am addicted to you and I shake on the floor in your absence.” All of her subsequent liaisons can be viewed as an attempt to recapture the intensity of what she felt during this first one.

Her appetite for adultery is almost pathological: at a family party, she wanders into the woods and has sex with a virtual stranger, Karl, whilst her husband makes small talk with their family. Having sex with Karl, she reflects “was like handing a wallet to a thief.” Moreover, she wanders into the woods in the first place because her sister-in-law is holding her baby daughter, and “Anna didn’t know what to do with her hands. She felt ill at ease, like a dateless girl at a school dance.”

The sex she has is transgressive not because it is extra-marital but because it is defined by brutality and detachment. One of her lovers tells her that he will “Tape your eyes closed. Shove a rag in your mouth.” Even before having sex with her husband, she reflects of his penis: “Erect, it was nearly as long as a dinner knife and as big around as the face of a man’s pocket watch. Uncut. Precision straight. It was obscene, aggressive, and, and in just a minute it would split her apart.”

Her life is not entirely bleak, however, not least because she develops a friendship with Mary, from her German class. It is only when the two women and their families spend the day together that Anna feels “Happiness moved […] down through her belly to the deadbolt room of her pelvis, where she tended to file her grievances with the world.”

We fear for her as she becomes increasingly untethered from reality. An adult orphan, it seems entirely plausible that she could be utterly adrift in this sterile Swiss suburb. It is part of Essbaum’s great skill that in spite of her wilful disassociation, Anna is nonetheless not an unsympathetic character. In a moment of crisis, we are encouraged to pity her, even though “A force (from within? from without? Anna could never tell) took charge and drove the bus of her where it willed.”

The heady intensity of Essbaum’s prose will not be to everyone’s taste. When describing Anna’s first infidelity, Essbaum says simply “They fucked so hard that afterward neither could walk.” This is a complex, powerful first novel nonetheless and Hausfrau bears comparison with its obvious antecedents, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary .