PEOPLE COLLIDE

What happens when a man finds himself trapped in his wife's body?

Eli and his wife, Elizabeth, are in Bulgaria, sharing a cramped studio while Elizabeth completes a prestigious though underpaid fellowship teaching American culture at a nearby school. One day, Eli leaves the apartment to visit Elizabeth in her classroom and discovers that somehow his mind is now inhabiting her body. His body, with Elizabeth presumably inside it, is missing. So begins Eli’s Kafka-meets-Freaky Friday journey to find his wife, all the while figuring out how to live inside her body. Much of the book's brilliance is found in McElroy’s explorations of Eli learning to inhabit this new body, a body he'd once been familiar with, he'd interacted with and observed but finds uncanny to suddenly be. When Eli crosses his arms, he's struck by how “unfamiliar it [feels] to hold Elizabeth as Elizabeth.” He misses his wife desperately, but considers how it isn’t necessarily her body he longs for (he now has a very intimate relationship with it, after all), but rather the “peculiar ways Elizabeth carried her body, for the feeling of looking up to see her across the room, knowing she was separate but with me.” Chapters occasionally switch to an omniscient third-person narrator who gives more insight into Elizabeth, showing how different perspectives, different bodies, offer multiple interpretations of shared realities. Occasionally, the novel seems like it falters—plot points and characters feel somewhat random, and high-tension moments are interrupted before reaching catharsis—but McElroy always manages to throw a new, exciting wrench into the puzzle before the pacing has had time to slow down too much.

A creative, well-written exploration of marriage, gender, and desire.