TRONDHEIM

When their son collapses, an unhappy couple travels to his bedside, leaving behind none of their exquisitely described marital baggage.

Together for a quarter century, Alba and Lil are enduring an ordinarily unpleasant day at their home in the south of France—house renovation, subterranean power struggles, overt bickering—when they get a call that their 20-year-old son, Pierre, studying in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, has had a heart attack and died. Resuscitated, he now lies comatose in a hospital. Pierre might wake up fine. He might wake up with brain damage. He might not wake up at all. Lil “had often fantasized that a great life crisis would bring focus and calm. How maddening, now, that Alba seemed determined to make it another version of their petty everyday game.” Maddening indeed, but Alba is hardly the only troublemaker in either the relationship or in Irish writer James’ delicate, incisive third novel. Blunt, horny, and unsentimental, Lil, a former rugby player, handles the stress of Pierre’s catastrophe by acting out: She hits a Trondheim gay bar, initiates a flirtation, hatches a scheme, drinks. Alba, moderate and more conventional, judges and withholds. Again and again, James captures with forensic accuracy the subtle tensions in the marriage. Consider Alba’s purchase of an airport coffee for Lil: “Lil peeled off the lid and peered into the cup. ‘That’s the way she gave it to me,’ Alba said. ‘What did you ask for?' 'If you don’t like it, don’t drink it,’ Alba said. This was the problem they called 'dairy.' It was an alibi, Alba knew, for something far more personal and far less precise.” Pierre’s medical situation is acute and dramatic, but the women’s marital troubles, mundane and chronic, are the real subject of this extraordinary and meticulous little book.

An X-ray picture of the subcutaneous breaks and sprains in a rocky relationship.