An edgy chronicle of loneliness

Attenberg, Jami ~ The Kept Man

When I selected this book I thought
This is the second of the unintentional family grouping on the A shelf. On a more serious level, I was curious how a young, urban woman in real life would portray the challenges of a young, urban married woman whose husband is in a seemingly unrecoverable coma.

50-word description
Former drug-guzzling, New Yorker party girl, Jarvis Miller, exists in an endless void of her husband lying in a coma for the past six years. The book’s title refers to her husband and three ‘trophy husbands’ she meets in a laundromat and leans on to re-start her life.

150-word review
The Kept Man has been the most interesting read relating to critical opinion so far. Reviews have ranged from “airless dirge” to “deftly written and very engaging” and I’m glad I didn’t do any research until I’d made up my own mind.

I’m firmly in the camp of the impressed. From the quirky-but-readable typeface to recognising and depicting the impact of depression, loneliness and confusion causing Jarvis to lash out and unintentionally add to her burden, Attenberg has done an empathetic and insightful job of putting the reader in Jarvis’s shoes. She also parallels cleverly the emptiness of Jarvis’s hedonistic single days with her not-alive-not-dead married life.

Some events, such as Jarvis meeting three well-to-do men washing their laundry in public, are a creative stretch according to some reviews, but ‘her’ men use laundry day to bond and escape their kept lives, in the same way that Jarvis uses the Tuesday routine as a diversion from her existence.

I will be hunting down her book of short stories.

jami attenberg ~ the kept man

Found in
Fiction A

Borrowed
Nov 08

Author’s link:
Author’s web site

Rating
Notable

This is book 9 of the project.