THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE

English-Australian Gemmell (Alice Springs, 1999, etc.) pens a strangely unnerving fourth novel in the second person, published anonymously in England last year, about the sexual tribulations of a bourgeois wife grasping for gratification within marriage and without.

A journalism professor at the University of London marries in her mid-30s and quits her job at the urging of new husband, international art restorer Cole, to become a full-time wife. Months later, on a delayed honeymoon in Marrakech, she overhears Cole on the phone with her best friend, Theo, and decides the two must be having an affair—thus beginning her path of crushing emotional revenge in the form of frigid withdrawal and, eventually, full-blown sensuous enlightenment with Gabriel, a Spanish-English virgin actor. Little by little, addressing herself and the reader as “You,” the unnamed narrator reveals some of her shockingly repressed secrets: she can’t stand her husband in bed, and she’s never, never had an orgasm. She wants to love her husband for his steady ability to provide, yet she gets enormous erotic charge by initiating Gabriel into her wildest secret desires. Her salvation, she decides, will come through writing a book, inspired by a medieval family heirloom called A Woemans Worth, written anonymously and espousing the substitution of a more able man in the place of an inadequate husband. The narrator finds new purpose both in marriage and affair by haunting the London Library for research and rendezvousing with Gabriel once a week. But when it comes time to make the right choice, will she return to the husband she doesn’t love, ensuring a lifetime of devastation? The story is fashioned as something between a diary and a sexual primer, chock-full of women’s feelings about sex and sexual fantasies of all sorts. Though already used to baring their souls on TV, American women might still cleave to Gemmell’s stuttering earnestness.

Proof that the feminist movement has brought women barely out of the Dark Ages.