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Product Description
Francesca Woodbridge is spying on her former life -- a recent lover, a wounded husband, and a rapidly changing America. "One morning I stood on the back deck of our handsome house and I realized that my interior self, the self I did not present to the world or even to those closest to me, seemed to have burned out." So confesses Francesca Woodbridge, the narrator of Deirdre McNamer's remarkable new novel. As her feelings recede "from the visceral to the archival," Francesca rekindles herself with plans for a garden, which lead to a lover -- her Russian gardener, an exile from Chernobyl. Now Francesca is supposedly in Greece with a tour group, but she is actually living in disguise just blocks from where her husband, Ren, and her teenage son await her return. Ren, a lawyer, is recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted some months earlier by a mysterious intruder. Francesca moves unnoticed through the town she calls home, seeing it with "the seizing eyes of a traveler," as Cynthia Ozick once put it. Her memories have a similar hyperclarity. She tells a series of stories that traverse the past four decades, beginning with her childhood in a wheatlands town overlooking missiles aimed at Russia. Her voice is searching, specific, unsparing, and sometimes darkly funny. In the process of listening, we learn who shot her husband, a modest mystery that rests on a larger one: for a woman like Francesca Woodbridge, at the end of this particular century, what is a fully lived life?
Amazon.com Review
Francesca Woodbridge's seemingly normal life as wife and mother in a Midwestern town belies a fierce and consuming "desire for desire." Though the narrator of My Russian has suppressed her true nature for many years, when her lawyer-husband, Ren, is shot by a mysterious intruder, she realizes she cannot, like other people, handle her "roiling dreams, morning sweats ... like pets that can be sent back to obedience school." But this is just the latest in a long string of events that have poisoned her domestic life. Years before, Ren abandoned his ideals and took a job with a white-shoe firm, and Francesca is eternally angry at him for it. She begins to transgress--a liaison with a young man, then an affair with her Russian gardener. But it is when she takes a break from tending Ren after the shooting and goes to Greece (only to sneak home and live in disguise at a motel for a week) that her life is altered irrevocably.
Deirdre McNamer's third novel is infused with a deep melancholy rooted in her character's awareness of life's fragility. It is precisely this awareness that forces Francesca to be true to her desire for desire, no matter the outcome. "I'm hoping to channel it into something constructive," she says, "but it's possible that that won't happen. It may be my religion, my way of insisting on the existence of some unseeable truth. It may also be a way of going blind. Of missing what's best when it's right before your eyes." A scary religion, that, but as My Russian makes clear, it's one that Francesca, like the truly faithful, cannot help but obey. --Katherine Anderson
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