Ursula ParrottCritiques

[b:Ex-Wife|2142191|Ex-Wife|Ursula Parrott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1299409219l/2142191._SY75_.jpg|2147681] by [a:Ursula Parrott|973825|Ursula Parrott|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1683529851p2/973825.jpg], published anonymously in 1929, was as good as promised when I heard about it on Backlisted's Patreon podcast and they recommended it as the feminine counterpart to Gatsby in describing the Jazz Age and what happens to young women who are caught between Victorian morality and the sexual revolution of the twenties. I responded with a raised glass to the blurb's description of the narrator as "wedged between Edith Wharton's constrained society girls and the squandered glamour of Jean Rhys's doomed wanderers."
The first person narrator, Pat, announces to her newest man, Noel:
"Don't have any illusions about me. I have slept with more men than I can remember." That was exaggeration, but I had to exaggerate, lest I should understate.
And he responds..."Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result." But, in the all too familiar refrain, he's taken, and Pat continues the high life in search of a stable closure. And [a:Ursula Parrott|973825|Ursula Parrott|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1683529851p2/973825.jpg] sold 100,000 copies of the novel.

Funny how timeless divorce is. This is a lovely, wistful book that only occasionally reminds you it was written in the 1920s.

Extra-marital sex. Abortion. Substance abuse. Skepticism about the sexual revolution, and how it sure seems to just screw over women.

Is it the 1960s? The 1970s? No - it's 1925.

Definitely a fascinating look at sex and the (newly) single girl and the city back in your grandmother's day. It starts with our protagonist's husband's exit, and has a very nice twist of an ending, but the middle was too long and made me very impatient with Patricia's endless, mindless promiscuity. And I wish the heroine could have been given a bit more going for her besides her looks - that got very tiring to read about too. I was super sick of hearing about her "creamy" shoulders, and super sick of every man she met gushing over her beauty.

Good lines:

"New York's a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much."

"Great Lovers - men who've known a hundred women, and boast of it - they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra... He couldn't play a tune on any of them in the end."½

Patricia is married to Peter and they live in New York City. She has a baby who dies, oddly with no further explanation. The odious Peter has an affair. Patricia forgives him. She has one and he treats her like trash. She becomes pregnant again and he throws her through a glass door. She won’t keep this baby either.

“I’m having an abortion this morning.” He had said. “Your show. Hope it’s not too bad.”

She gets advice. “In three years you won’t remember the colour of his eyes.”

Patricia dates other men, gets a new apartment, still wants Peter back, although at this point it’s difficult to say why. She eventually loses the need for him.

“I wished that I had never married him, never kissed him, never met him, never heard of him. Also, that I had a revolver and could shoot him.”

When she meets Noel, the second man she comes to love, he is married to a disfigured woman, Beatrice, who won’t divorce him. Patricia then helps Noel and Beatrice, him with his career, and her with her disfigured face, knowing that she will lose Noel forever. “God is an ironist.”

There’s a very good parting scene. She eventually marries a man who she likes but certainly doesn’t love.

A foreword and afterword put some context into this 1929 novel, the scandal it aroused, and the life of the author. A striking aspect of the novel is that Patricia is no 1920s housewife. She has a career in advertising and uses it to her advantage.½

Patricia and Peter split up after Pat sleeps with his friend. They have what we would now call an open marriage, but in the end it’s only open for Peter. Pat still loves him and wants him back. Hard to understand why – he’s such an unpleasant man – but life is difficult without a husband and a failed marriage is the woman’s fault.

Pat moves in with another ex-wife, Lucia. Pat spends her nights dancing and drinking at night clubs and sleeping with men she doesn’t much like. Lucia classifies ex-wives into three groups: class one “go in for celibacy and business success”; class two says, “Love is over, there remains …adventuring about.”; class three marries again.

Both women have well-paid jobs but neither sees herself as a career woman. Lucia describes marriage as the only alternative to becoming in her forties “a worn-out, irritable female sitting around an advertising office shivering every time they hire a bright young copy-writer just out of college, and being distressingly polite to an advertising manager ten years younger than myself.” A woman has to marry while she still has her looks.

The book seems surprisingly modern. Pat goes to the gym in the morning before her work as an assistant advertising manager. She and Lucia chat about contraception, feminism, men and clothes. They’re witty, amusing and well-read.

I loved the descriptions of the clothes, the décor, the speakeasies and the dancers in the Harlem clubs. The story rockets along energetically and entertainingly, with one unfortunate slow-down for a bit of melodrama towards the end. It’s as though a piece of a different book were inserted, self-sacrificing, uplifting and completely out of character for our appealingly mercenary and superficial heroine.

An entertaining picture of the changing roles of women in the permissive, hedonistic twenties.

Written in the 1920s, Ex-Wife is the first-person story of a young woman who sounds like a modern woman dealing with divorce, abortion, infidelity, one-night stands, and heartbreak. However, she does hold quite a few of the manners and habits associated with her era. Fascinating. This could be quite an eye-opener for those who think American women weren't sexually liberated until the Sixties.