The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald

For Wald’s women the punishing nature of desire is also a desire to be punished.Įssentially two novellas wedged somewhat awkwardly together, “Secret Lives” begins with “The Man Under the House,” a meticulously rendered slow burn: a wife with a past, an overeager handyman, a controlling husband - all the essentials of a classic Cain love rack. If the author can seduce the audience into investing in that desire, and the fate of the lovers in its thrall, the reader essentially joins them on that rack, with each plot twist proving another pull of the rope, another turn of the screw.įrom its opening pages, Elissa Wald’s “Secret Lives of Married Women” signals its debt to Cain, from the first-person confessional voice to the heroine’s fear of sounding like a “tabloid wife.” Most of all, the masochism inherent in the genre - Cain’s femme fatale in “Postman” famously cries out, “Bite me!” to her lover - serves as the backbone of the book. In Cain’s novels, desire is a prison, a death trap. The term’s connotations of torture were apt. Cain set forth a concept he called the “love rack.” For him, it meant finding a way to manipulate readers into caring about his criminal characters and their plight, and surrendering to the story. Discussing his classic noir tales of adultery and murder, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” James M.

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald