The irritation of Jean

Caroline Moore

ATTACHMENT by Isabel Fonseca Chatto, £15.99, pp. 306, ISBN 9780701181741 ✆ £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The title of Isabel Fonseca’s first novel is promisingly witty: an ‘attachment’ is both a supplement to an e-mail, and a bond of human intimacy; and the main plot of the novel revolves around how the first may destroy the second.

Jean Hubbard is a freelance health correspondent, living on a tropical island, from which she files 1,150 words every other Wednesday. Her husband, Mark, runs ‘one of the most innovative ad agencies in London’ (he is certainly innovative in doing so from St Jacques without a computer in the house). Long-overdue post from England is delivered to their island once a month in a large bag; and the plot begins when Jean finds a tape-sealed envelope addressed to her husband and, acting on ‘a simple greedy urge to open the one real letter in the bag,’ does so.

The letter, however, is an ill-written and salacious message, signed ‘Thing 2’, informing Jean’s husband that to remind him of her ‘sweet thighs’, she has opened a new hotmail account (Naughtyboy1@hotmail. com) with attachments for him to ‘drool’ over.

Jean misses the moment to confront her husband with this letter (he is in the lavatory), and so logs on herself in the local Internet café. The attachments take a long time downloading.

This is a potentially gripping start to the novel, even if one cannot quite believe that a woman would not wait until her husband emerged from the loo (how long can that take?). And a potentially extremely intriguing idea is introduced: in answering this e-mail via her husband’s alias of ‘Thing 1’ — shades of Dr Seuss’s anarchic invad ers — Jean becomes complicit. Her imagination is drawn, unwillingly stirred, into unexpected zones.

Yet this promising plot rapidly loses impetus and even interest. This is partly because it becomes sidelined. Too many other strands of narrative crowd in, too many ‘life-crises’ overrun Jean’s life. There is a breast-cancer scare; there is her relationship with her overbearing mother, who belatedly reveals the truth behind her parents’ divorce; her daughter becomes engaged; her father becomes critically ill; and there is a mysterious young female stalker as well as an encounter with the old lover whom her mother wished she had married. Jean flits from St Jacques to London to New York and back to the island, and loops through her memories; and the flow of the novel is muddied by increasingly episodic eddies.

There is too much of everything: a long, physically explicit description of the indignities of a mammogram, and a long, physically explicit account of an internal examination by a gynaecologist; the introduction of 9/11 and the 2003 blackout in New York; and men of all kinds, including her revolting publisher, make a play for Jean. This reads like a novel that has been too long in gestation, so that the author has had time to add far too much.

Above all, there is too much self-analysis. The novel is seen entirely from Jean’s perspective-free point of view, caught within her ‘churning thoughts’. These are already thoroughly churning in the opening pages, and do so, relentlessly if quite intelligently, throughout the novel, with a degree of turbid and poisonous self-absorption that rapidly becomes profoundly irritating.

This is chiefly, of course, the reaction of a reader. One becomes frustrated, both for narrative development (‘stop churning, woman, and get on with it!’), and for the development of character. No other character is ever given any breathing-space to develop in their own right. This ultimately compromises our sense of Jean, since we have no sense at all of any ‘attachment’ to an independently-existing husband.

It is unclear quite how profoundly unsympathetic Jean is intended to be. She is a woman who hoards grievances, which then go round and round in her head like planes stacking above a fog-bound airport. These unfortunately comprise the body of the novel. Irritation is her default mode. It is typical of her that, immediately after opening the letter, her thoughts go straight back to Mark’s habit of ‘leaving his boxers on the bathroom floor, inches from the laundry basket’, and that this should then flow into blaming his mother (‘The old snob with her groundless sense of superiority. She’d never truly acknowledged her American daughter-in-law’).

Jean is routinely annoyed by every member of her family. She is ‘irrationally outraged’ by the fact that her elderly mother brings three suitcases on a trip to St Jacques. When Jean returns to London, where her daughter, Vic, has been housesitting in her absence, Jean, like the worst sort of landlord, instantly and beadily spots deficiencies: ‘The ornamental purple cabbages in the window boxes were all gone. Dead heads carefully disposed of by the person who forgot to water them?’ Presumably that was the same person who is told by her mother that someone ‘not mentioning any names, didn’t clean the coffee machine’ and who let the sofa get ‘a whole shade dirtier’.

Jean’s happily-married sister also inspires profound irritation, even for her telephone manner: ‘Hello’. You’d think from her tone she singlehandedly ran a handicapped circus, not just three young sons. Nothing wrong with their voices, anyway, Jean thought, holding the receiver and their boy screams away from her ear.

Jean is not stupid (she is the sort of woman who corrects her husband’s grammar in an argument), and is perpetually self-accusing, as well as self-justifying; but even this is grotesquely self-centred. She sees that she is ‘petty and ungenerous’, and tries to think ‘wholesome, charitable, lifelengthening thoughts’. Life-lengthening for whom? Charity becomes the moral equivalent of eating a high-fibre diet.

One begins to hope this novel will become a tale of moral re-education; and when Jean embarks on a sordid affair of her own, she does seem to be heading for a shaming nemesis. Maddeningly, however, the novel ends with her still in a position to patronise her husband, and doing so.

Though there are plenty of sharp insights and strong images to be encountered in this novel, it becomes a slowmoving and exasperating moral and emotional tangle.