wife by charlotte mendelson

the spectator 10 august 2024

Charlotte Mendelson has been described in the Times as a ‘master at family drama’, and her previous novel, The Exhibitionist (2022), contained in Ray Hanrahan one of the most odious fictional husbands ever. Mendelson clearly has an appetite as well as talent for writing awful spouses. In her latest novel, Wife, Penny Cartwright is if anything even worse.

This is the story of a lesbian relationship that sours. The book begins at the marriage’s end, but in its slightly confusing structure it leaps back to the beginning and then forward again. In fairness, these time- jumps are clearly signalled and I think the sense of bewilderment they nonetheless create is intentional. Although the narrative is in the third person, this is really an account of what happened from the point of view of Zoe Stamper, Penny’s wife, who has been thoroughly gaslit, so the sense of the reader being on the back foot beside her feels deliberate.

The claustrophobic bullying in the marriage is so well done that I found it nausea-inducing. Zoe’s mortifying shyness – which Penny presses on, as though it were a bruise – is also well-evoked, as is her intense longing for Penny at the beginning of their relationship: ‘Zoe would look at her slender wrist, or the soft stretch of her under-arm, and wonder if one could pass out with desire.’ Troublingly, that desire is in part fuelled by the way Penny humiliates Zoe, even from the start:

It usually turned Penny on that Zoe would pull away out of shyness when people could see them; she’d whisper filthy plans for her into Zoe’s ear, watch her writhe. And, afterwards, in private, she’d torment her, call her her little virgin, her sexy slut, with predictable results.

This is not an accidentally lesbian novel: Penny and Zoe go the cinema to watch the lesbian classic The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon, and later, The Kids Are All Right, which featured Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a couple – notably, a couple who are troubled when their children develop a relationship with their biological father. Mendelson is also good on London’s lesbian tribes, particularly of the past:

With Ali, the Old Girlfriend, Zoe had struggled with certain aspects: her Hawaii-Five-O pushed-up shirt-sleeves, all that folk-singer silver-and-turquoise jewellery. The hat. She’d tried to find the British Telecom hockey player’s wash ’n’ go haircut and warm-up gear alluring, and failed.

But the heart of this novel is how Mendelson portrays, with some comedy alongside the horror, the disintegration of a marriage – and Penny and Zoe’s marriage is complicated by the existence of Robin, the children’s biological father, and also by Justine, Penny’s former lover. There are some toe-curling scenes with all four of these characters in family therapy. What is truly radical about Wife, however, is its portrayal of a contemporary lesbian couple behaving as dysfunctionally as a straight one might.

This review originally appeared in The Spectator