BookBrowse Reviews My Husband by Maud Ventura, Emma Ramadan

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A woman plots and schemes to hold on to her perfect marriage…but her obsession might have gone too far.

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For couples who've chosen to spend their lives together, the passionate flames of new love tend to eventually cool into a sort of comfortable warmth. One's spouse becomes a beloved partner rather than an object of infatuation. Maud Ventura's provocative novel My Husband, translated from French by Emma Ramadan, explores what it's like when that doesn't happen.

Ventura's unnamed narrator, a forty-year-old English teacher and book translator (see Beyond the Book), is intensely obsessed with her husband of fifteen years. As the book opens, she frames this situation as still loving him as much as she did the day she met him. But as the plot progresses, the reader quickly discovers her obsession is deeper — and darker — than mere butterflies. Told over the course of one week in the couple's life, this story has all the tension of a domestic suspense novel with the biting wit of a dark comedy. It skewers the idea of the "perfect" marriage and reveals the inner thoughts of a well-off suburbanite.

The narrator structures each of her decisions around pleasing and impressing her husband. He likes to sleep with the blinds closed, so she sleeps in a pitch-black room, even though she'd prefer open curtains. When he's about to come home from work, she picks up just the right impressive book so she can casually pretend she was reading it. She gives equal weight to his own small choices; when he lets go of her hand while they're sitting on the couch, it sends her into a spiral of questioning his devotion to her. An offhand remark at a party leaves her fuming for days. Even as he lies in bed asleep, she searches his face for answers as to whether he's happy.

Her obsession with perfection is primarily focused on her marriage, but spills out into other areas of her life as well. As a woman from a working-class background who has married into the upper middle class, she's taken great lengths over the years to learn the ins and outs of her new social world. She has carefully studied the women in her husband's circle, and mimics their clothing, etiquette and hobbies. She feels driven to be admired and envied.

The effect of the author's choice to tell the story over the course of just a week is that each day is fraught with meaning. The reader is really thrust into the middle of the narrator's marriage, with only glimpses of the courtship and early relationship. All of this results in the feeling of observing a couple one has just met in real time. The short duration also highlights the day-by-day (and even moment-by-moment) fluctuations in the main character's mood and perceptions.

Through the first-person prose, we get an up-close glimpse at her thoughts and neuroses. Ventura creates a character who's not necessarily sympathetic, but who compels us to keep turning the page. Our lack of insight into what the husband is thinking leaves us, like the narrator, trying to peer into his mind by observing his actions.

Something interesting about this book is how universal the themes are. At their core, the narrator's anxieties about class, her appearance and her marriage, as well as her tendency to compare herself to those around her, are relatable to those of us living far from her part of French society. Though her efforts to please her husband are taken to extremes, My Husband points to the very real and broader issue of women's undervalued labor in relationships and the pressure to appear effortlessly flawless. The main character gets her hair meticulously highlighted and spends hours searching for the perfect clothes to buy, yet hides the amount of work she puts into managing these things.

My Husband strikes the same eerie yet satirical tone as the novel-turned-Netflix series You, only in this case the protagonist isn't a scruffy bookseller but a perfectly coiffed Frenchwoman. The story it tells seems quiet on the surface, but deep tensions ripple underneath. It prompts the reader to consider just how well they really know their spouse.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2023, and has been updated for the June 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.