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Jan. 28th, 2015 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsContinuing my slow journey through the works of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, last week I read The Innocent Mrs. Duff.
This one reminded me a lot of The Unfinished Crime -- Mr. Duff, like Branscombe, is a respectable, middle-class prig with a sense of entitlement the size of the state of Texas and not-so-secret depths of utter moral turpitude. Except Duff is worse than Branscombe. And Branscombe is pretty awful!
When the book starts, Duff is annoyed by everything about Reggie, his new, young, pretty wife; she's stupid, she's got no class, she can't seem to do anything right. Except then she does something right, and there's a reason why that's wrong, too; and why does his incredibly wealthy great-aunt, the classiest person he knows, seem to think Reggie's awesome, can't she see how horrible and annoying she is? God, she's probably having an affair. If only she would have an affair, so he could get rid of her. Or ... something. SOMETHING. Not that he's the kind of person who'd do anything like that, of course not, he's classy, but come on, can't everybody see that his circumstances are just intolerable?
It's a scathing portrait of a man who's congenitally incapable of taking responsibility for anything that's wrong in his life -- including his alcoholism, which is also escalating dramatically through the course of the book -- and what redeems it from being just unbelievably depressing is a.) the fact that it's extremely page-turney and b.) how, as in The Unfinished Crime, there's a network of amazing women supporting each other around the edges of the terrible, terrible protagonist. Many of Duff's greatest mistakes are in completely failing to understand that his aunt and Reggie really like each other, that Reggie and the governess that he has a crush on like and support each other too; he's so busy drawing up a portrait of Reggie as The Actual Worst Thing In The World that he can't fathom it at all. But in a genre that tends to fall in with the popular image of women as being constantly at each other's throats, it's really refreshing to see how consistently Holding's books refute that.
(...but if you're going to pick one Holding book about a really unlikeable and privileged protagonist getting his comeuppance, I'd go with The Unfinished Crime myself.)
This one reminded me a lot of The Unfinished Crime -- Mr. Duff, like Branscombe, is a respectable, middle-class prig with a sense of entitlement the size of the state of Texas and not-so-secret depths of utter moral turpitude. Except Duff is worse than Branscombe. And Branscombe is pretty awful!
When the book starts, Duff is annoyed by everything about Reggie, his new, young, pretty wife; she's stupid, she's got no class, she can't seem to do anything right. Except then she does something right, and there's a reason why that's wrong, too; and why does his incredibly wealthy great-aunt, the classiest person he knows, seem to think Reggie's awesome, can't she see how horrible and annoying she is? God, she's probably having an affair. If only she would have an affair, so he could get rid of her. Or ... something. SOMETHING. Not that he's the kind of person who'd do anything like that, of course not, he's classy, but come on, can't everybody see that his circumstances are just intolerable?
It's a scathing portrait of a man who's congenitally incapable of taking responsibility for anything that's wrong in his life -- including his alcoholism, which is also escalating dramatically through the course of the book -- and what redeems it from being just unbelievably depressing is a.) the fact that it's extremely page-turney and b.) how, as in The Unfinished Crime, there's a network of amazing women supporting each other around the edges of the terrible, terrible protagonist. Many of Duff's greatest mistakes are in completely failing to understand that his aunt and Reggie really like each other, that Reggie and the governess that he has a crush on like and support each other too; he's so busy drawing up a portrait of Reggie as The Actual Worst Thing In The World that he can't fathom it at all. But in a genre that tends to fall in with the popular image of women as being constantly at each other's throats, it's really refreshing to see how consistently Holding's books refute that.
(...but if you're going to pick one Holding book about a really unlikeable and privileged protagonist getting his comeuppance, I'd go with The Unfinished Crime myself.)
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Date: 2015-10-10 10:53 pm (UTC)I got the impression that he had pursued her aggressively when they first met (possibly because she was so different from his first wife, before that inevitably palled) and she was inexperienced about relationships (a fact he now holds against her, of course, in an amazingly ridiculous application of the double standard) and therefore I think she came to the marriage without much in the way of expectations, except for the inevitable cultural expectation of marriage and here was a guy behaving as though he really wanted her and so why shouldn't she? And then he turned out to have an awesome aunt and a really nice kid and a circle of friends who aren't all terrible people; it was just the actual Mr. Duff who was the problem. I love how strongly the novel indicates, without ever deviating from Duff's viewpoint (and briefly Lieutenant Levy's, at the end), that Reggie is going to be just fine. She'll have to get through the aftermath of the novel and then she'll attend junior college and she'll be a fantastic mother to Jake and she'll inherit Aunt Lou's money eventually, but until then the two women will enjoy each other's company, because I loved the way everyone in the novel is having friendly, supportive relationships around the protagonist and he never, never notices. And his crush on Miss Castle comes to nothing, of course.