Virgil, an aggressively handsome but lackluster insurance salesman, has concerns about his wife. On an unseasonably warm November day, Kathleen has dipped herself into the swimming pool at their apartment complex in suburban Delaware and won’t come out. “The men at Equitable had spoken of ‘episodes’ with their wives, and Virgil worried that’s what this was turning into.
A bona fide episode.” It is around this single “episode” that “The Most,” Jessica Anthony’s spare, elegant novella, revolves. Her previous novel, “Enter the Aardvark,” was a darkly funny political satire that might best be described as unhinged.
That plot involved taxidermy, closeted gay politicians and a stuffed aardvark. The premise of Anthony’s new book had me thinking this would be in a similar vein: A housewife gets into a swimming pool and decides to stay there. But “The Most” is darkly funny in its own way, and in the end is less a comedy than a smoldering, Cheeveresque mediation on mid-century, middle-class disappointment.
Little, Brown “The Most” By Jessica Anthony Little, Brown. 144 pages. Paperback, $18.
99 The novel unfurls over the course of one day – Sunday, Nov. 3, 1957. The Russian spacecraft Sputnik 2 has just begun to orbit the earth, and strapped inside the small cabin is a tiny dog named Laika.
Not only does the dog’s fate seem cruel – fears that it will not survive the orbit will prove true – but the mere idea of a dog in space adds another layer .