Jami Attenberg The Kept Man (Riverhead 2007)
Jami Attenberg’s chain story collection, Instant Love: Fiction, tenderly showed three women and their search for love in any and all of its forms. Attenberg’s newest release, the novel The Kept Man, narrows that focus onto Jarvis Miller and her love for her painter husband Martin, who has been lying in a coma for the past six years.
Attenberg’s novel is simply beautiful. So much so that I’m reticent to say much else about it, honestly, as I feel I’d be doing the novel a disservice. It’s just simply breathtaking to watch Jarvis, so devoted to her beloved that she’s made the goal of her entire life to care for his body, go through such a range of feeling and torment as she decides that she still wants to live. She begins so absolutely crippled by the accident that sent Martin into a coma that she doesn’t leave the house. A visit to the Laundromat when her washer breaks spurs her desire for more, and she ends determined and content, nearly confident in all of her actions. Naturally, Jarvis makes the mistakes any half-widow would take, being so lonely for thinking kindness for lust and lust for love. And it’s in that journey that Attenberg is so successful.
Through all of Jarvis’s mistakes and joys, Attenberg makes every moment vivid and poignant, be it by her rhythmic syntax or the constant attention to something as simple as color. Attenberg connects the changes that happen in Jarvis’s Brooklyn neighborhood with the changes occurring in Jarvis. She allows Jarvis to find pieces of Martin in other people and realize that she can’t ever have him back whole. Attenberg forces the reader to feel empathy for Jarvis in every moment, be it trying to masturbate but failing because the eager husband in her mind keeps icing over, sleeping with a married man to get even with Martin after she realized he cheated on her, or simply waiting for something, anything, to happen. Attenberg shows so many aspects of love and what it can do to a person, how it can consume them but also break them. It’s all just utterly astounding.
Of course, Attenberg sprinkles the pop culture references we love throughout the book (including Pixies and The Who), but they don’t seem to matter much here. Attenberg’s detailed writing makes all the difference.
