Sex and the
married woman
Mia Levitin
Three Women
by Lisa Taddeo
Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99, pp. 320
The epigraph of Three Women comes from
Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see
out in the sunlight is always less interesting
than what goes on behind a windowpane.’
Inspired by Gay Talese’s 1980 reportage
on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s
Wife, Lisa Taddeo, a journalist and Pushcart
prize-winning short story writer, peered
into the windows of three ‘ordinary’ Amer-
ican women to illustrate their ‘erotic lives
and longings’. We meet Lina, a suburban
housewife straying from her sexless mar-
riage with an old flame; Maggie, a young
woman who has brought charges against a
high-school teacher with whom she alleg-
edly had an affair as a student; and Sloane,
an elegant restaurateur in her early forties,
living out her husband’s cuckold fantasies
with partners of his choosing.
Taddeo set out to ‘register the heat and
sting of female want, so that men and other
women might more easily comprehend
before they condemn’. We watch as Mag-
gie — whose story gets the most airtime —
is ostracised by her community, while the
man she has accused of misconduct thrives
as state teacher of the year. Lina’s confi-
dantes cluck about her infidelity, but we see
her suffering from her husband’s repeated
rejection. Sloane faces the consequences of
her actions firsthand when she is confronted
by the wife of one of the men with whom
she has been involved.
The most poignant parts of Three
Women concern class more than desire.
Taddeo delicately describes the last days of
Maggie’s father’s life before he committed
suicide, having sunk into depression after
losing his blue-collar job. Pre-#MeToo,
Maggie’s experience on the witness stand
raises ‘the all too familiar question of when
and why and by whom women’s stories are
believed’.
Despite the access the author was
afforded as she embedded herself in the
lives of her subjects, however, the blinds
remain partially drawn. The eight years ded-
icated to the project might suggest a sexual
Seven Up of sorts, with the evolution of the
three women’s wants unfolding in real time.
Instead, much is recounted from memory,
with the backstories unfurling unevenly:
while we are privy to cloying details of Mag-
gie’s teenaged lovesickness, the aftershocks
of Lina’s having been drugged and gang-
raped at 15 are only cursorily addressed.
Any selection of only three case studies
will invariably leave something, and some-
body, out. Taddeo has said that her intention
was not to show desire across the board,
but to share the stories of these three par-
ticular women. Nonetheless, an attempt to
represent ‘what longing looks like in Amer-
ica’ may have warranted the inclusion of
more diversity and breadth of experience.
While the three women span class and geog-
raphy, they are all white, married, relatively
young and predominantly heterosexual.
And, ultimately, submissive. Maggie, who
lost her virginity to an older man before the
alleged affair, longs to be taken care of.
Lina knows she is at her lover’s whim —
reduced to pulp by desire, to paraphrase
Georges Bataille. Sloane is relieved to rec-
ognise herself as a submissive after reading
Fifty Shades of Grey — an epiphany which,
paradoxically, empowers her to initiate
group sex for the first time.
Story of O, however, this is not — nei-
ther in its depiction of the psychology of
submission nor in literary merit. Whereas
Pauline Réage’s O, seeking transcendencevia sexual surrender, is ‘profoundly active in
her own passivity’, as Susan Sontag noted,
Sloane remains ambivalent about perform-
ing for her husband’s pleasure. Scolded for
having swerved off-script, Sloane realises
that
she had not quite figured it out, who she was
and what she wanted, after all, and that dis-
covery, that there was yet more to discover,
didn’t make her feel excited about the bal-
ance of her life. It made her feel tired.Readers, alas, may find themselves sim-
ilarly wearied, with prose that does little
to elicit excitement. Those flipping forward
to get to the good bits, in search of reprieve
from passages such as ‘She is refined and
so are her world, her bedsheets, her brain’,
will be disappointed to find the sex scenes
no better rendered. Baudelaire’s flâneur-
voyeur-artiste concludes ‘Windows’ by
contending that whether the story he’s
imagined about the woman observed
‘across the ocean of roofs’ is accurate is of
no consequence, as long as it ‘has helped
me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am’.
Three Women shines a spotlight on the
sex lives of its subjects, but falls short of illu-
minating ‘what we are’ in this vital area of
our lives. The most interesting thing about
this hotly anticipated debut may well be
the attention it is attracting. Having earned
the author a seven-figure, three-book deal
and topped summer reading lists, one hopes
its publication heralds more penetrating
explorations of Eros to come. Although
undeniably admirable in ambition, its
execution leaves something to be desired.Eternal truths
Niall Griffiths
Night Boat to Tangier
by Kevin Barry
Canongate, £14.99, pp. 214It lives in me still, the intense thrill when,
as a child, I would listen to the Irish peo-
ple around me converse. Some would
express themselves in a personal language
of grunts and clicks; others would be
monosyllabically gnomic; and others would
make of English new and magical shapes.
They’d enrapture the language (especially
in oath and insult) and draw out its trans-
formative potential.
I relive that thrill whenever I come across
a new book by Kevin Barry. His words
address the reward centre in the brain, the
neural pathways that are enlivened by nic-
otine, alcohol or opioids. Reading him, I am
given the feeling that I’ve achieved some-
thing, done something good and am being
justly remunerated. The brain lights up
and grins.
Night Boat to Tangier, longlisted for the
Booker prize, begins in the Spanish port of
Algeciras one October night in 2018. We are
taken straight into a conversation between
two men, Charlie and Maurice, and the
opening line — ‘Would you say there’s
any end in sight, Charlie?’ — is perfect-
ly chosen, expertly adroit. I get echoes of
Paul Bowles, especially of Let It Come
Down. Both books take us immediate-
ly into the souls of people churned by
massive forces, both lay out for us the
human microcosm, the pitiable individu-
al. We learn, through a beautifully paced
sequence of revelatory detonations,
that Maurice and Charlie are friends,
coevals and former drug-dealers. Now,
in far from settled middle age, they’re in
search of ‘a small girl... a pretty girl. She’s
23 years of age by now. She’ll be dreadlock
Rastafari.’
The question of who she is, and what
her relationship to the two men is, slowly
unfurls; what explosive discoveries await
on the next page, what heartbreaks or ecsta-
sies? Past schemes, scams and escapades
inform the eternal present; the future, when
we get there, is present in what becomes
our past. This is vital, given the super-
natural thread that runs through the book
— the issue of predestination, of cyclical
returns, of truths that might be eternal.
There will forever be a spiritual dimension to
unavoidable suffering.
Maurice and Charlie are too endear-
ing as characters, and too alluring, to truly
test our empathy; nor are they the focal
point — that would be the enigmatic girl.
But the beauty of their interactions
and histories make this novel utterly
compelling.Maggie is ostracised, while the man
she accuses of misconduct thrives
as state teacher of the year