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Overview
“Wise and wonderful. . . Buchan celebrates the patience and wisdom that only age can bring.” —USA Today
“Bottom line: Get Revenge.” —People
Get ready to cheer for Rose Lloyd, a woman of young middle-age who proves that starting over doesn’t have an age limit. After twenty-five years spent juggling husband, career, and kids with admirable success, Rose suddenly finds both her marriage and her career in unexpected ruin.
Forced to begin a new life, she is at first terrified, then energized, by her newfound freedom—it’s amazing what prolonged reflection, a little weight loss, a new slant on independence, and some Parisian lingerie will do for the psyche!
Witty, insightful, and emotionally resonant, Buchan’s novel will strike a chord with anyone who has ever wondered what Middle Age would look like from the other side of the looking glass (answer: much better than you could ever expect).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101200346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2003 |
| Series: | The Two Mrs. Lloyds , #1 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 556 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Hometown:
London, EnglandDate of Birth:
May 21, 1948Place of Birth:
Guildford, Surrey, EnglandEducation:
Upper Second Honours Degree in English Literature and History, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1970Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
"Here," said Minty, my deputy, with one of her breathy laughs, "the review has just come in. It's hilariously vindictive." She pushed toward me a book entitled A Thousand Olive Trees by Hal Thorne with the review tucked into it.
For some reason, I picked up the book. Normally I avoided anything to do with Hal but I did not think it mattered this once. I was settled, busy, different, and I had made my choice a long time ago.
When we first discussed my working on the books pages, Nathan argued that, if I ever achieved my ambition to become the books editor, I would end up hating books. Familiarity bred contempt. But I said that Mark Twain had got it better when he said that familiarity breeds not so much contempt but children, and wasn't Nathan's comment a reflection on his own feelings about his own job? Nathan replied, "Nonsense, have I ever been happier?" and "You wait and see." (The latter was said with one of his ironic, strongman I know-better-than-you smiles, which I always enjoyed.) So far, he had been wrong.
For me, books remained full of promise, and contained a sense of possibility, any possibility. In rocky times, they were saviors and lifebelts, and when I was younger they provided chapter and verse when I had to make decisions. Over the years of working with them, it had become second nature to categorize them by touch. Thick, rough, cheaper paper denoted a paperback novel. Poetry hovered on the weightless and was decorated with wide white margins.
Biographies were heavy with photographs and the secrets of their subjects' life.
A Thousand Olive Trees was slim and compact, a typical travelog whose cover photograph was of a hard, blue sky and a rocky, isolated shoreline beneath. It looked hot and dry, the kind of terrain where feet slithered over scree, and bruises sprouted between the toes.
Minty was watching my reaction. She had a trick of fixing her dark, slightly slanting eyes on whoever, and of appearing not to blink. The effect was of rapt, sympathetic attention, which fascinated people and also, I think, comforted them. That dark, intent gaze had certainly comforted me many times during the three years we had worked together in the office.
" 'This man is a fraud,' " she cited from the review. " 'And his book is worse . . . ' "
"What do you suppose he's done to deserve the vitriol?" I murmured.
"Sold lots of copies," Minty shot back.
I handed her A Thousand Olive Trees. "You deal. Ring up Dan Thomas, and see if he'll do a quickie."
"Not up to it, Rose?" She spoke slowly and thoughtfully, but with an edge I did not quite recognize. "Don't you think you should be by now?"
I smiled at her. I liked to think that Minty had become a friend, and because she always spoke her mind I trusted her. "No. It's not a test. I just don't wish to handle Hal Thorne's books."
"Fine." She picked her way round the boxes on the floor, which was packed with them, and sat down. "Like you said, I know how to deal." I am not sure she approved. Neither did I, for it was not professional behavior to ignore a book, certainly not one that would receive a lot of coverage.
My attention was diverted by the internal phone. It was Steven from production. "Rose, I'm very sorry but we are going to have to cut a page from Books for the twenty-ninth."
"Steven!"
"Sorry, Rose. Can you do it by this afternoon?"
"Twice running, Steve. Can't someone else be the sacrificial lamb? Cookery? Travel?"
"No."
Steven was harassed and impatient. In our business-getting an issue out-time dictated our decisions and our reactions. After a while, it became second nature, and we spoke to each other in a shorthand. There was never time for the normal give and take of argument. I glanced at Minty. She was typing away studiously, but she was, I knew, listening in. I said reluctantly, "I could manage it by tomorrow morning."
"No later." Steven rang off.
"Bad luck." Minty typed away. "How much?"
"A page." I sat back to consider the problem, and my eye fell on the photograph of Nathan and the children, which had a permanent place on my desk. It had been taken on a bucket-and-spade holiday in Cornwall when the children were ten and eight. They were on the beach, with their backs to a gray, ruffled sea. Nathan had one arm round Sam, who stood quietly in its shelter, while the other restrained a squirming, joyous Poppy. Our children were as different as chalk and cheese. I had just mentioned that a famous novelist had also taken a house in Trebethan Bay for six months to finish a novel.
"Good heavens." Nathan had made one of his faces. "I had no idea he was such a slow reader." I had seized the camera and caught Poppy howling with laughter at this latest example of his terrible jokes. Nathan was laughing, too, with pleasure and satisfaction. See? he was saying to the camera. We are a happy family.
I leaned over and touched Nathan's face in the photograph. Clever, loving Nathan. He considered that the job of fatherhood was to keep his children so amused that they did not notice the unpleasant side of life until they were old enough to cope, but he also loved to make them laugh for the pleasure of it. Sometimes, at mealtimes, I had been driven to put my foot down: at best, Sam and Poppy's appetites were as slight as their bodies and I worried about them. "Mrs. Worry, do you not know that people who eat less are healthier and live longer?" demanded Nathan who, typically, had gone to some pains to find out this fact to soothe my fears.
Back to the problem. As always with the paper, there were political factors, none significant in isolation but taken together, they could add up. I said to Minty, "I think I'd better go and fight. Otherwise Timon might get into the habit of paring down Books. Don't you think?" The "don't you think" was cosmetic for I had made up my mind, but I had fallen into the habit of treating Minty (just a little) in the way I had treated the children. I thought it was important to involve them on all levels.
Timon was the editor of the weekend Digest in the Vistemax Group for which we worked and his word was law. Minty had her back to me and was searching for Dan Thomas's telephone number in her contacts book. "If you say so."
"Do I hear cheers of support?"
Minty still did not look round. "Perhaps better to leave it, Rose. We might need our ammunition."
When it was a question of territorial battles, Minty was as defensive as I was. This made me suspicious. "Do you know something that I don't, Minty?" Not a silly question. People and events in the group changed all the time, which made it a rather dangerous place to work, and one had to become rather protean, undercover and dangerous to survive.
"No. No, of course not."
"But . . . ?"
Minty's phone rang and she snatched it up. "Books."
I waited a moment or two longer. Minty scribbled on a piece of paper, "An ego here bigger than your bottom," and slid it toward me.
This implied that she would be on the phone for several minutes, so I left her to it and walked out into the open-plan space that was called the office. The management reminded its employees, frequently and cheerily, that it had been designed with humans in mind, but the humans repaid this thoughtfulness with ingratitude and dislike: if it was light and airy, it was also unprivate and, funnily enough, despite the hum of conversation and the underlying whine of the computers, it gave an impression of glaucous silence.
Maeve Otley from the subs' desk maintained, with a deep sense of grievance, that it was a voyeur's paradise. It was true: there was nowhere for staff to shake themselves back into their skins, or to hide their griefs and despairs, only the fishbowl where the owners had not bothered to put in a rock or two. I grumbled with Maeve, who was another friend, against the imposition, the terrorism of our employers, but mostly, like everyone else, I had adapted and grown used to it.
On the floor below, Steven was surrounded by piles of computer printout and flat plans, and looked frantic. A half-eaten chicken sandwich was resting in its container beside him with several small plastic bottles of mineral water. When he saw me bearing down on him, he raised a hand to ward me off. "Don't, Rose. It's not kind."
"It's not kind to Books."
He looked longingly at his sandwich. "Who cares, as long as I can get it done and dusted and into bed? You, Rose, are expendable."
"If I make a fuss with Timon?"
"You won't get diddly . . ."
No headway there. "What is so important that it thieves my space? A shepherd's pie?"
"A nasty demolition job on a cabinet minister. I can't tell you who." Steven looked important. "The usual story. A mistress with exotic tastes, cronyism, undeclared interests. Apparently, his family don't know what's coming, and it's top secret."
I felt a shudder brush through me, of distaste and worry. In the early days, I used to feel plain, unadorned guilt for the suffering that these exposTs caused. Lately, my reaction had dulled. Familiarity had made it commonplace, and it had lost its capacity to disturb me. Yet I hated to think of what exposure did to the families. How would I cope if I woke up one morning to discover that my everyday life had been built on a falsehood? Would I break into pieces? The effect on the children of these stories of deceit and betrayal did not bear too much thought either. But I accepted there was little I could do, except resign my job in protest. "And are you going to do that?" asked Nathan, quite properly. "No." So my private doubts and occasional flashes of guilt remained private.
"I feel sorry for them," I said to Steven. All the same, I ran through a list of possible candidates in my head. I was human.
"Don't. He probably deserves it."
Steven took a bite of his sandwich. "Are you going to let me get on?" By chance, Nathan stepped out of the lift with Peter Shaker, his managing editor, as I was going in. "Hallo, darling," I murmured. Nathan was preoccupied, and the two men conferred in an undertone. It always gave me a shock, a pleasurable one, to see Nathan operating. It was the chance to witness a different, disengaged aspect of the man I knew at home, and it held an erotic charge. It reminded me that he had a separate, distinct existence.
And that I did, too.
"Nathan," I touched his arm. "I was going to ring. We're due at the restaurant at eight."
He started. "Rose. I was thinking of something else. Sorry. I'll-I'll see you later."
"Sure." I waved at him and Peter as the doors closed. He did not wave back.
I thought nothing of it. As deputy editor of a daily paper published by the Vistemax Group, Nathan was a busy man. Friday was a day packed with meetings and, more often than not, he stumbled back to Lakey Street wrung out and exhausted. Then it was my business to soothe him and to listen. If the look on his face was anything to go by, and after twenty-five years of marriage I knew Nathan, this was a bad Friday.
The lift bore me upward. Jobs and spouses held things in common. With luck, you found the right one at the right time. You fell in love with a person, or a job, tied the knot and settled down to the muddle and routine that suited you. I admit it was not entirely an accident that Nathan and I worked for the same company-an electronics giant which also published several newspapers and magazines under its corporate umbrella-but I liked to think that I had won my job on my own merits. Or, if that was not precisely true, that I kept on my own merits.
Poppy hated what Nathan and I did. Now twenty-two, she had stopped laughing and believed that lives should be useful and lived for the greater good, or she did at the last time of asking. "Why contribute to a vast, wasteful process like a newspaper?" she wanted to know. "An excuse to cut down trees and print hurtful rubbish." Poppy had always fought hard, harder than Sam, and her growing up had been like a glove being turned inside out, finger by finger. If you were lucky, it happened gently, the growing-up part, and Poppy had not fared too badly, but I worried that she had her wounds.
When I returned to the office, Minty was talking on the phone but when she saw me she ended the conversation. "I'll talk to you later. Bye." She resumed typing with a heightened color.
I sat down at my desk and dialed Nathan's private line. "I know you're about to go into the meeting, but are you all right?"
"Yes, of course I am."
"It's just . . . well, you looked worried."
"No more or less than usual. Anyway, why the touching concern all of a sudden?"
"I just wanted to make sure nothing had happened."
"You mean you wanted to be first with the gossip."
"Nathan!" But he had put down the phone. "Sometimes," I addressed the photograph, "he is impossible."
Normally Minty would have said something like: "Men? who needs them?" Or: "I am your unpaid therapist, talk to me about it." And the dark, slanted eyes would have glinted at the comic spectacle of men and women and their battlegrounds. Instead, she took me by surprise and said sharply, "Nathan is a very nice man."
Knocked off guard, I took a second or two to answer. "Nice people can be impossible."
"They can also be taken for granted."
There was a short, uncomfortable silence, not because I had taken offence but because what she said held an element of truth. Nathan and I were busy people, Nathan increasingly so. Like damp in a basement, too much busyness can erode foundations. After a moment, I tried to smooth it over. "We're losing a page because there's a demolition job going in."
"Bad luck to them." Minty stared out of the window with a sauve qui peut expression. "So, it goes on."
Again, it was unlike Minty not to demand, "Who-who?" and I tried again. "Are you going shopping this evening?" I smiled. "Bond Street?"
She made a visible effort. "I may be getting too fat."
Private joke. Bond Street catered for size eight. Since Minty possessed fawnlike slender limbs, a tiny waist and no bosom, this was fine. No assistant fainted at the size of her arms. But I was forced to shop in Oxford Street where the stores grudgingly accepted that size fourteen did exist. Ergo, together we formulated the Law of Retail Therapy: the larger your size, the further from the city center a woman is forced to forage. (Anyone requiring the largest sizes presumably had to head for the M25 and beyond.) Apart from that, Minty and I suffered-and, in our narrow retail culture, I mean suffered-from big feet, and the question of where to find shoes for women who had not taken a life's vow to ignore fashion was a source of happy, fruitful speculation.
The conversation limped on. "Are you doing anything else this weekend?"
"Look, Rose," Minty shut her desk drawer with a snap, "I don't know."
"Right."
I said no more. After all, even in an office, privacy was a basic right. I had to make a decision between two reviews because one had to be sacrificed. The latest, and brilliant, book on brain activity? In it, the author argued that every seven years our brain cells were renewed and replenished, and we became different people. This seemed a quietly revolutionary idea, which would have clerics and psychotherapists shuddering as they contemplated being put out of business. Yet it also offered hope and a chance to cut chains that bound someone to a difficult life or personality. However, if I published the piece, I would have to drop the review of the latest novel by Anna West, who was going to sell in cartloads anyway. Either the book that readers should know about, or the one that they wanted to know about.
I rang Features. Carol answered and I asked her if they were running a feature on Anna West.
Carol was happy to give out the information. "Actually, we are. This issue. Big piece. Have you got a problem?"
"I might have to spike our review so I wanted to make sure there was coverage in publication week."
"Leave it to us," said Carol, delighted that Features would have the advantage over Books. I smiled, for I had learned, the hard way, that a sense of proportion was required on a newspaper, and if one had a habit of bearing grudges, it was wise to lose it.
I worked quickly to rearrange the two remaining pages, allocating top placing to the seven-year brain-cycle theory. Ianthe, my mother, would not see its point: she preferred things uncomplicated and settled.
As the afternoon wore on, the telephone rang less and less, which was perfectly normal. Minty dealt with her pile of books and transferred them to the post basket. At five o'clock, she made us both a mug of tea and we drank it in a silence that I considered companionable.
*
On my way home, I slipped into St. Benedicta's. I felt in need of peace, a moment of stillness.
It was a modern, unremarkable church, with no pretensions to elegance or architectural excitement. The original St. Benedicta's had been blown up in an IRA terrorist campaign thirty years ago. Its replacement was as downbeat and inexpensive as a place of worship should be in an age that was uneasy about where the Church fitted. As usual, on the table by the glass entrance doors, there was a muddle of hymnbooks and pamphlets, the majority advertising services that had taken place the previous week. A lingering trace of incense mixed with the smell of orange squash, which came from an industrial-sized bottle stored in the corner-presumably kept for Sunday school. The pews were sensible but someone, or several people, had embroidered kneelers that were a riot of color and pattern. I often wondered who they were, the anonymous needle-women, and what had driven them to harness the reds, blues, circles and swirls. Relief from a drab existence? A sense of order in transferring the symbols of an old and powerful legend onto canvas? St. Benedicta's was not my church, and I was not even religious, but I was drawn to it, not only when I was troubled but when I was happy, too. Here it was possible to slip out from under the skin of oneself, breathe in and relish a second or two of being no one in particular.
I walked down the central aisle and turned left into the tiny Lady Chapel where a statue of the Madonna with an unusually deep blue cloak had been placed beside the altar. She was a rough, crude creation, but oddly touching. Her too-pink plaster hands were raised in blessing over a circular candle stand in which a solitary candle burned. A Madonna with a special dedication to the victims of violence, those plaster hands embraced the maimed and wounded in Ireland and Rwanda, the lost souls of South America and those we know nothing about, and reminded us that she was the mother of all mothers, whose duty was to protect and tend.
Sometimes I sat in front of her and experienced the content and peace of a settled woman. But at other times I wondered if being settled and peaceful had been bought at the price of smugness. Fresh candles were stacked on a tray nearby. I dropped a couple of pounds into the box and extracted three from the pile. One for the children and Nathan, one for Ianthe, one to keep the house-our house-warm, filled and our place of our refuge.
I picked up my book bag, had a second thought, put it down again and hunted in my purse for another pound. The fourth candle was for the erring minister's wife, and my dulled conscience.
On the way out, I stopped and tidied the pamphlets on the table. Even though it was dark, I continued home by the park, prudently choosing the path that ran alongside the river.
Nobody could argue that it was anything but a city park, ringed as it was by traffic, pockmarked with patches of mud and dispirited trees, but I liked its determination to provide a breathing space. Anyway, if you took the trouble to look, it contained all sorts of unobtrusive delights. A tiny corona of snowdrops under a tree, offering cheer in the depths of winter. A flying spark of a robin redbreast spotted by the dank holly bushes. Rows of tulips in spring, with tufts of primula and primrose garnishing their bases.
So far, winter had been a mild, dampish interlude. Earlier in the day, there had been halfhearted spatters of rain but now it was almost warm. It was too early to be sure, only February, but there was a definite promise of spring shaping up, things growing. I stopped to shift my book bag from one shoulder to the other, feeling the stretch and exhilaration of my life pulse through me.
I was late. I must hurry. I must always hurry.
Five minutes later, I walked up the tiled front path of number seven Lakey Street. Twenty years ago, Nathan and I had talked of restoring a silk weaver's house in Spitalfields, or discovering the perfect-priced Georgian family house on four floors, which-unaccountably-no one else had spotted. Lakey Street fitted between our small flat in Hackney and any wilder speculations. One day, we promised ourselves, we would upgrade, but we settled promptly into the Victorian terrace that comfortably encompassed our family and forgot about doing any such thing.
The streetlights were lit, and the fresh white paint on the window frames was washed with a neon tint. The bay tree dripped onto me as I passed and, for the thousandth time, I told myself it was far too big, planted in the wrong place, and would have to go. For the thousandth time, I reprieved it.
--from Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan, Copyright © February 2003, Viking Press, a member of the Penguin Group, Inc., used by permission."
What People are Saying About This
"This beautifully written novel about a discarded middle-aged wife brims with surprises."." —USA Today, in naming the 10 Best Books of 2003
"Wise and wonderful...Buchan celebrates the patience and wisdom that only age can bring." —USA Today
“Bottom line: Get Revenge.” —People
“Revenge may be sweet, but Revenge is not, thank goodness.” —The Wall Street Journal
“What I like about this book is everything.” —Elizabeth Berg
Reading Group Guide
Our Reading Group Recommendation
Hell, it is said, hath no fury like a woman scorned. But while Elizabeth Buchan's novel Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is a story of a woman wronged, her memorably told tale goes much further than this cliché. Indeed, the triumph of Rose Lloyd, a 40-something books editor at a large newspaper, is not that she gets back at those who have hurt her but that when her life turns a sudden corner into disaster, the experience brings her something she (and we) might never have anticipated.
Rose's story of a marriage that collapses overnight will fascinate readers and groups who are interested in questions of how relationships evolve and how infidelity affects us. Her struggle to understand how we can remain blind to changes going on inside a close partner makes for intriguing, and perhaps even challenging, conversations.
But beyond these themes, Revenge of a Middle-Aged Woman spins a broader fable of personal change, as the heroine realizes how much she has taken for granted. Many will find Rose's journey -- from outrage and grief through reflection to a new understanding of her life -- a touchstone for thinking about the surprising transformations that come through unexpected events.
The novel also offers readers the pleasures of Buchan's considerable wit and descriptive flair. The sometimes savage office politics of a London newspaper are expertly conveyed; Rose's retelling of a youthful -- and disastrous -- expedition to the Amazon basin, with her first lover, is a surprising but rich diversion and gives this novel a scope well beyond the urban world in which it begins.
Finally, this is a book as much about family as it is about love and marriage. Groups will find that Buchan creates a memorable set of secondary characters as she delves into the lives of Rose's adult children, her big-hearted but strong-willed mother, and her close friends. Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is a shrewd and often comic take on family relationships in the modern world that is bound to inspire reflections on how much -- or how little -- these have changed over the past half century. (Bill Tipper)
An Introduction from the Publisher
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is a modern Everywoman's tale. It is the funny, heartfelt, and sad-but definitely not tragic -- story about love and how it touched forty-seven-year-old Rose Lloyd. As a college student, Rose fell in love with a man. His name was Hal and he loved her but also wanted to roam the world. Then she met Nathan, who wanted to marry her and raise a family. Rose loved Nathan, too, although for different reasons. She made a decision.
One wedding, two children, and twenty-five years later, Rose is a book editor for a weekly London paper where husband Nathan also works as the deputy editor. Rose is at peace in her life, happy and secure in the knowledge that she has successfully balanced the often conflicting demands of home and career. But when Nathan announces that he is leaving her for another woman, the stability she has always relied upon is unexpectedly gone.
Nathan laments, "I feel imprisoned by the walls I've built around me," just before he tells Rose that he's leaving her for Rose's own trusted twenty-nine-year-old assistant, Minty. Young, attractive, and incredibly ambitious, Minty has designs on more than Rose's husband. The same day that she loses her husband, Rose discovers that she is going to be replaced on the job by none other than Minty, who promises to bring a younger look and tone to the book section.
Out of a job, a marriage, and soon to be ousted from the cozy home and garden she's lavished with care, Rose is suddenly alone with too much time on her hands. While her friends and children rally around her, Rose is dealt a blow by her mother, who implies that it was Rose's selfish decision to work outside of the home that destroyed her marriage. Rose sinks into despondency, begins to drink a little too much, and wonders if her mother is right. But when in the midst of her mourning, her beloved cat, Parsley, dies, Rose realizes, "I had had enough. I wanted my grief dead." She decides to live -- and that's when the fun really begins.
With the complacency and safety of her married life and career gone, Rose remembers how a long-ago trip to Rome showed her that most people lived, not in the radiant semitransparent envelope that writers described but in a plain brown one with which they had to make do but it was better than nothing: "I was sixteen . . . and in love for the first time -- with being there, out of England. Rome was noisy, filled with smells -- coffee, exhaust, sweat, hot buildings -- and its flux of life, noise and sensation flowed through me, intensely, luxuriously felt." As Elizabeth Buchan weaves the narrative back and forth between Rose's youth and middle age, we see Rose once again reach out for the meaning in life and to courageously explore the life-altering decision she made long ago. What she discovers is sweet revenge, indeed: the promise of better days ahead, no matter what age we are.
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think the young Rose should have stayed with Hal or did she make the right decision to marry Nathan?
2. How would you describe Minty's relationship with Rose? Were there definite indicators something was amiss that Rose might have noticed sooner?
3. Do you think that Rose was complacent in her marriage and career? What have you learned from her journey toward self-exploration?
4. What do you think of Minty? Did she really want Rose's life all along and just pretended to be independent or do you think something changed her?
5. Rose sought friendship and solace with friends to help her through the depression. Are there other ways she might have helped herself? What would you have done?
6. The novel was written from a wife's point of view. At any time in the novel, did you find yourself sympathizing more with Nathan than with Rose?
7. Which character, if any, in the novel disappointed you most and why? Which character surprised you most and why?
8. How do you think Rose's life choices have influenced her daughter Poppy's life? Do you think Poppy's marriage will last?
9. The novel ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens next?
An Interview with Elizabeth Buchan
You weave the narrative beautifully between the joys and sorrows of her time with Hal and her marriage to Nathan. Why did you choose to frame the story this way?
One of the points I wanted to explore was about timing. When we make our choices -- to marry, to have children, to change jobs, etc. . . . has a direct bearing on how successful or not our lives will be. Rose knew she wanted children and, however intense and addictive her feelings for Hal, it was not likely to happen with Hal, who wanted different things. Reflecting on her history helps Rose to clarify the muddle and anguish left by the breakdown of her marriage, and also to suggest these ideas to the reader. Amplifying the same point, Nathan chooses to step back out of one cycle that is coming to an end, only to find he is back in the same place, and is now faced at fifty-something with a reduced income, a wife, and twins. More important, perhaps, he has deprived himself of a peace and freedom that he might have expected after the hurly-burly of raising one family.
Ianthe has always been completely unsupportive of Rose. To what degree do you think this influenced Rose in the choices she made?
Again, one of the points I thought would be interesting to write about was the connections and the differences among three generations of women: Ianthe, Rose, and Poppy. Ianthe is very much a woman from an older generation. She does support her daughter, but she also holds different views about forgiveness and about the traditional role of women and how they should conduct their lives. She would consider it part of her support, and duty, to speak her mind. To a certain extent, we all shrug off the nostrums and mind-set of the older generation. If Rose does just that with Ianthe, what is Poppy doing with Rose?
When Rose is told about the affair, she questions Nathan: ". . . is it because as we grow older, we grow less confident . . . and we need to reestablish ourselves all over again?" Do you feel this is the reason why most marriages fall apart?
Of course, becoming middle aged is not all plain sailing -- there are disappointments and bitter griefs. Women mourn their changing looks and some feel that they have become invisible. Life is more complicated, less straightforward, and less easy to pin down than it appeared to be in the twenties and thirties. As a result, both sexes may, at times, feel a little daunted, which is what Rose is questioning. Here is where the courage and resilience of middle age can be so well deployed. It is probably true to say that in any long-term relationship a fault line will appear at some point as the individuals are bound to change, develop, and reorientate themselves. If the partnership is functioning, this will add richness and exhilaration. But if it is not, and the fracture is not dealt with and discussed, undoubtedly it must contribute to the breakdown of a relationship.
Mazarine, upon hearing the news that Nathan has left Rose, blithely comments to Rose, referring to the affair as a phase that will ultimately end, "Be practical and wise, it's our role in a crazy world." Could you elaborate on that statement?
As a Frenchwoman, Mazarine is reflecting a culture where affairs are seen in a slightly different light. But she is also expressing a view on sexuality and sexual behaviour that she is considering within a larger context -- a philosophy that comes from her worldly experience. She is urging Rose to view Nathan's straying as a blip and not as a finality. What she in effect is saying: marriages are tougher than affairs. These things happen. Ride through it.
Some critics have said that Mazarine is so vivid that she deserves her own book. Who is your favorite "minor" character?
I have to confess to having a great fondness for Mazarine. I love her practicality and her elegant theories of life. But I also find Alice very intriguing -- a young woman determined on her career who is thrown hard against a brick wall of inconvenient emotion. In her way, Alice is quite brave.
Did you write this story to help liberate middle-aged women from those husbands who wish to start new lives with younger women? What inspired the book's amazing title?
I wrote the book because I was interested in the stage of life where it is possible to look both back and forward, and it is a very interesting place to be. Sooner or later, we all get there and the rewards are that patience, observation, and experience yield more subtle and textured pleasures than the ardency and impatience of our younger years. That is the theme. The plot is about the "happily ever after": i.e., what can happen to us after we have settled down with our Prince Charming and it goes wrong -- a situation which offers plenty of drama for the novelist. The title just arrived in my head. Bang. It stems from the Spanish proverb. "Living well is the best revenge."
The setting and character of your novels are very British yet the book has become a New York Times bestseller. Has it surprised you how much American audiences have embraced Revenge?
The response in the US has been fantastic and generous and I confess to being just a little surprised, but hugely delighted. Then again, the breakdown of a marriage is something that happens in many western cultures -- thus, in that sense, it is a universal predicament. I also feel that the slightly older woman had been ignored lately in fiction. Her voice should be heard, too!
Are you working on anything now?
The Good Wife (UK title), which takes a look at marriage. What is it? How does it work? Why does it last? Fanny has been married for twenty years to a politician, a position that requires her to look good but remain silent in public. But she is no fool and, after her daughter leaves home, she begins to question her choices . . . and her future.
