Lonesome Ballroom

Meet Betty Block—docile daughter, woebegone wife, aspiring aspirant, and anti-heroine for the ages! Or is the narrator of Madeline McDonnell's farcical, heartbreaking, and formally brilliant first novel just another woman caught in the sneakily patriarchal plots of the early-aughts? And has she left her ostensibly sensitive husband for an hour or two or forever?

As Betty pulls up a chair at the Lonesome Ballroom and tries to explain herself to Lizzie, her erudite-but-distant bartender, she f...