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Published on 5/7/08
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Isabel Fonseca’s Attachment arrives more than a decade after the author’s best-selling account of gypsy culture, Bury Me Standing, and marks her first foray into fiction. This stylistic leap demonstrates Fonseca’s versatility as an astute observer of human behavior, both real and imagined, and affirms her status as a literary heavyweight—right alongside husband Martin Amis.
Marriage and its illusions are prominent themes in this thoroughly modern look at intimacy. Attachment’s protagonist, Jean Hubbard, is a middle-aged health columnist spending her sabbatical in the idyll of a remote island. One day Jean discovers a scandalous letter addressed to her ad-exec husband, Mark, which forces her to reevaluate everything she had previously taken for granted. Rather than running away from this startling discovery, Jean decides to pose as Mark online to develop her own steamy Internet relationship with the offending intruder. While struggling with her spouse’s apparent infidelity and her own out-of-control actions, Jean embarks on a quest for personal meaning that takes her around the world, through the infinite reaches of cyberspace and eventually within herself.
Fonseca uses catalysts of emotional distress—adultery, aging, illness, death—to study the timeless pursuit of stable identity in the context of contemporary digital culture. As a newbie novelist with a background in journalism, she sometimes lets her critical expertise impose on fluid storytelling—the narrative is cluttered with analogies and metaphors that overexplain her characters’ actions. And yet it is this same analytical eagerness that gives the book its haunting resonance. Through her anthropologist lens, Fonseca ultimately transforms the familiar into the foreign, forcing both her characters and her readers to examine their unquestioned perceptions about who they and their loved ones really are.
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