Horace Gast is the gruff owner of The Pueblo Chieftain (where Bena gets a job as an unpaid society reporter), who turns out to have a secret reason for saving Bena and Ted's lives on their way to Pikes Peak. These interpretations of the world - and of Bena's relationship with her husband and child - are at the heart of ''The Mineral Palace,'' but Julavits has, inexplicably, diminished their strength with a parade of tiresomely colorful ''The woman hit him, pretending to be horrified, which masked a pretending to be delighted.'' (''They took vows and exchanged rings, they promised to tell each other everything, but they never did tell each other much.'') Of a seemingly playful scene in a bar, she writes, Whenever she attends to Bena's inner life, Julavits shines, peeling back layers of human behavior even as she's making deceptively Her view of the world is poetically bleak, and at this point so is Julavits's prose. Big Ted explains that she's just imagining things, that she's suffering from postpartum depression.īena thinks he may be right. (''Nobody she knew had a child so still and so quiet.'') One day she finds the babyĬovered with fire ants, showing no reaction.
AndĪlthough Bena loves their infant son, Little Ted, she's convinced that something is horribly wrong with him.
The town strikes Bena as one big dust storm constantly waiting to happen. The apartment they're renting is depressing. and their new life leaves a good deal to be desired. The year is 1934 the Jonssens have just moved from ''You've always got somebody.'' Bena considers her husband's infidelity the least of her problems. ''I know you've got somebody,''īena tells him casually at one point. Ted Jonssen, the philandering husband in Heidi Julavits's promising but erratic first novel, ''The Mineral Palace,'' and his wife barely seems to mind. Screen mother explains that when men get bored they can't do something sensible like buying a hat they have to see themselves reflected in a new woman's eyes. And on cable television the other night, I came across that scene in ''The Women'' where Norma Shearer's
Kiss since Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley's at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. One presidential candidate is so desperate to distance himself from the Oval Office adultery scandals that he gave his wife the most showily passionate live-television Of the 20-something years they'd been together. An old friend, recently divorced, has learned that her husband was sleeping around for most In this first novel, set in 1934, the wife of a philandering doctor is stuck in Colorado.Īrried men who cheat are beginning to get on my nerves.
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