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Book Reviewed by:From "one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page" (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family's apartment complex one morning and won't come out.
It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won't come out.
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.
The Most is a novel about unhappiness in marriage in the vein of Raymond Chandler, John Updike, or Alice Munro. But the most obvious comparison is that it feels like a lost season of the television show Mad Men in its representation of how the strains of marriage, or monogamy really, can pull two people apart, especially when they are living in the pressure cooker of traditional gender values imposed and strictly enforced by mid-century America. It is more engaging than Mad Men in that it focuses more centrally on a repressed housewife who is both vibrantly compelling and unfailingly sympathetic (even when her actions are inscrutable) but less so in that the husband is as handsome as Don Draper but without the intelligence or charm...continued
Full Review
(672 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Alissa Nutting, author of Made For Love and Tampa
An exquisite, taut literary mousetrap—this is a tale of sport in every sense of the word, of game and play, winning and losing, strategy and choice. If the secret of jazz, our male protagonist's hidden passion, is the notes they don't play, then the secret of this aching novella is the words the characters don't say to each other. Jessica Anthony's writing is a thunderous, polyphonic music all its own. Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
Jessica Anthony's The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing. The novel captures a haunting unrest at the core of midcentury American life, treating its aimlessly striving characters with a stern caress of grace. The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting. Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
The Most achieves the impossible: it says something new about marriage. In this thrilling novel, Anthony's genius for structural and chronological invention is grounded in sensory richness and the most vividly idiosyncratic characters I've encountered in a while. This is a 21st century literary classic waiting to happen.
Though the story unfolds largely through flashbacks, the present-day events of The Most occur on November 3, 1957, which is the day the Soviet Union launched its satellite Sputnik 2 into space. This date was chosen at the behest of Premier Nikita Krushchev to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Occurring at the height of the Cold War, the three Sputnik missions brought considerable consternation to the United States, which had announced its own plans to orbit Earth with a satellite in 1955, only to be upstaged by its Soviet nemesis with the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957. To make matters worse, it was believed that the satellites were evidence that the Soviets could launch ballistic missiles capable ...
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