My Only Wife Jac Jemc 9781936873685 Books
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Ten years ago the narrator unlocked the door of a wrecked apartment, empty of any trace of his wife. As stunning as her disappearance is his response. He freezes on the facts of her, haunting his recollections. This is the story of a man unable to free himself enough from the idea of a woman to try to find her.
"My Only Wife is a sneaky book. It guiles the reader with clean prose and apparent simplicity into believing that it’s a novel about the narrator’s only wife. It may be about many things – about absence, emptiness, and loss – but it really isn’t about the narrator’s only wife. It’s more like an empty glass from the cupboard, an abstraction, a form, and it invites us to fill it with particulars from our own experience." —David Allan Barker, nouspique.com
"Jac Jemc has written a novel so wonderful that if it were a dish served at a social event, I would ask the hostess for the recipe." –NewPages.com
“Jac Lemc's novel My Only Wife is a brilliant, haunting, and heartbreaking debut that explores themes of loss and love.” –Large Hearted Boy
“The author sculpts her characters to reveal their bare form, which just happens to include their innermost flaws. She impressively closes the gap between objects and affects, emotion and experience, exactly what any attempt at accurately portraying our world requires.” –Smalldoggies Magazine
“A book whose sentences have become textures in my memory that I will keep with me.” –Jess Stoner
“Jemc has done something quite extraordinary with her first novel. She has created a world that is at once familiar and at once strange. Just as the husband can never quite get close enough to his wife, the reader can never quite grasp where Jemc is taking her characters on their journey.” --Used Furniture Review
“In My Only Wife, Jac Jemc takes the noir and beauty and eternity of what we think is love and creates an entirely new narrative.” –-The Nervous Breakdown
“I don’t necessarily like the people in this book, but I understand these people and I love this book. And absolute pleasure to read, and I will cherish it on my bookshelf. I don’t often reread novels, but this is definitely one I’ll return to again and again.” –Samuel Snoek-Brown
“Jac Jemc paints a devastating picture of what happens to the one who gets left behind in her debut novel My Only Wife.” –-The Next Best Book Blog
End of the year Top Ten list at Volume I Brooklyn.
Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for debut fiction
Jac Jemc's work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome, and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She'd Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and is the poetry editor for decomP magazinE.
My Only Wife Jac Jemc 9781936873685 Books
This book is amazing. The wife's character is so complex and fascinating. I wanted more of the story at the end.Product details
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My Only Wife Jac Jemc 9781936873685 Books Reviews
THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
There is a sense of chaos involved in the act of falling in love, a lack of control, and quite possibly a hint of something tragic, a chance to be hurt. This applies to the slim but haunting novel My Only Wife (Dzanc Books) by Jac Jemc. In marriage there is the possibility of intimacy, a merging of spirit and life, but the reality can be a dense caryatid carved out of lies, mysteries, and selfish acts.
My Only Wife is about an unnamed couple, a husband who has fallen and surrendered, and a deceptive, passionate and quirky wife. The way Jemc renders their story is painful in its depiction of beauty and love, vicious in its evocation of what a broken heart feels like--the eternal echo of a call left unanswered.
I don't usually point out epigraphs, but the two that open up this novel are so perfectly selected that I need to mention them up front. The first is from Emily Dickinson
"That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get."
And the second is from Leonard Cohen
"Is this what you wanted? To live in a house that was haunted by the ghost of you and me?"
The wife is an enigma, defying expectations--inclusive and dependent one minute, reclusive and absent the next--and the Cohen lines, especially, touch on the idea of a cruel mistress (or master) who would ask a lover to stay in a place where there is only the ghost of what used to be.
The wife is a waitress, and though she keeps her thoughts and interpretations private, she has a unique ability to listen, to pull hidden narratives from her customers as if laying her hands on them to rid their souls of demons, and she shares their personal matters with her husband.
In the beginning of the novel, this behavior is eccentric at worst, just her way of connecting to the world, of being intimate, of embracing one of her many gifts. Over time, it becomes a weapon, a means of separating the couple.
The husband is in love with this woman, he adores her. His mantra, "My wife," echoes through the novel. How many times over the course of the novel does he utter this phrase? I counted--almost five hundred
"My wife climbed staircases like a bull, but she descended them like a Duchamp."
And
"My wife walked out of theaters when she was bored, offended, tired, felt like moving.
I sat through every movie I ever bought a ticket to, even if they were insufferable. I waited to see how a story turned out, if it redeemed itself."
And
"My wife was a constellation without a mythology to inform her shapes."
And so it goes. The husband worships the wife from afar, this distance she has put between them, allowing himself to be manipulated, grateful for what he has, always the optimist, happy to bask in her beauty, her uniqueness, her gifts.
Paired with her allure and the stories she shares with her husband are random hints of her mania, her depression. It's been said that genius borders on insanity. It doesn't take much to set the wife off, always churning, always full of passion and angst that is quick to bubble to the surface, to boil over
"My wife was conceding, letting the drama go, when she moved a bottle of bleach from the kitchen table. Beneath the bottle, on her good red tablecloth, was a wet spot faded to pink. My wife pitched the bottle into the basket. My wife shouted, `Why can you never not ruin something?'
`Excuse me?'
`You ruin everything. You are never not ruining something.'"
The reader is taken aback and, much like her husband, always searching for a logical reason for her outburst, for an apology, a way to make her happy. A simple mistake doesn't warrant such vitriol. Relationships are give-and-take, we build our partners up--we don't break them down. But with a deft hand Jemc weaves a pattern of contented life with that of misery and frustration. One day the couple is in love, holding hands and walking in the rain, and the next day they're coming to the realization that they don't know each other at all. It is a powerful potion that is brewed and simmered over time, building toward something, an end we know is coming, has been telegraphed already--but the mystery of how the darkness will descend still awaits us.
Another example. Late in the novel, the wife finds a love letter that the husband wrote to her a long time ago. The expected response would be one of nostalgia, of romance and appreciation. But she erases the letter instead. Why? She erases the letter because she can. The impermanence of the letter has offended her--why write it in pencil so that it can be rubbed blurry, so that it can fade over time, why make a gesture that is so fleeting? Love is eternal. And like so many times throughout this tense and beautiful novel, we nod our heads in agreement with her, the romantic in us all seeing her point, while at the same time inhaling with shock at the brutality of the act, her deletion, and the crass way in which she confesses her sin.
Towards the end of the book, after we bear witness to a powerful act of supernatural artistry (that, or simply her calculated and brutal cruelty) the husband writes his wife a letter, a love letter, even after all that has happened, in order to summon up his feelings and breathe again. Some of those thoughts, here, will shed a bit of light on his emotions
"I miss you. I've found bruises under my skin, now, weeks after you've gone missing, that stagnate and wait for you to heal them to a clean clarity of flesh... I am furious and I still love you."
To print any more of this letter would be unfair to future readers as it is one of the many deathblows that resonate throughout the final pages of this novel.
In My Only Wife, Jac Jemc takes the noir and beauty and eternity of what we think is love and creates an entirely new narrative. As much as the husband in this story is the victim, powerless to resist or refuse, so are we. Captivated by the flawed goddess that is his wife, we are lured in by her siren song and dashed across the rocks. Maybe we will learn--or maybe we never had a chance.
I had a tough time with this novel. If it hadn't been so short, I probably wouldn't have finished it. It's one of several novels on my shelf right now using first-person, unreliable narrators to describe the vanishing of their wives. The language in this novel was interesting, but in many ways I felt like it kept the characters at arms length rather than making them accessible.
The story is told from the point of view of a many whose wife is gone. Over the course of the novel, we learn a lot about her, but consistently she is referred to only as "my wife" rather than by her name.
It gives everything a dreamy quality, which is suspect is why this novel has such generally high reviews. It was an interesting a different read. Unfortunately, after just finishing Girl Gone, this book was a pretty big let down. It contains some of the same questions about love, (and sanity), but none of the shear dynamism of that book.
A boring book about nothing...
Excellent! I love the author's style of writing. I felt like I knew the only wife - every eccentric part of her. I got to the point that I knew when she would be upset before I read the words. Great character development. The stories in between were like an added treat. I hope there are more books by this author.
Poetically vibrant narrative. Great for lingering reads, quick revisits, a novel I'll continue to come back to.
I love how ultimately intangible the characters in this book seemed to me. The narrator spends the entire book remembering his wife, who left him without a trace, but he seems utterly mystified about her. His own identity only seems to take shape juxtaposed against his memories of his wife, and I've already mentioned how ephemeral that turns out to be, so it's almost like a relative description without a referent. Skillfully done and a thrill to read, the overall effect of the book is absolutely haunting.
I started this book a few weeks after my first child was born. I wasn't sure how well I'd be able to focus, but Jemc's compelling, conceptual work kept me hanging from chapter to chapter. With each vignette, the story and characters unfolded in ways that were often surprising and suspenseful. Jemc's narrator--the husband--seems to be turning over his understanding of his wife like an opaque crystal ball, trying and trying to somehow make sense of her. The reading experience is engaging in much the same way--one is constantly compelled to turned the page to gain a clearer picture of these fascinating characters. A really fantastic read, and a truly impressive first novel.
This book is amazing. The wife's character is so complex and fascinating. I wanted more of the story at the end.
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