Sophie Divry's 'Madame Bovary of the Suburbs' was a novel that crept up on me slowly. For almost two thirds of the book I was engaged enough to keep reading - in fact the prose is sparse but beautiful enough that I sped through this relatively quickly - but was unsure if I felt more than ambivalent about it. As I neared the end though, I realised that not only did I find Divry's characters utterly convincing - I could picture them, and imagine them speaking to one another - but that the book is also much more impactful and moving than its slightness and simplicity might suggest. Would recommend to fans of Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau or Anne Enright.

The French title of the novel La Condition Pavillonnaire, could be literally translated as ‘Suburban Life’, but for an English reader the Flaubert reference is made explicit. Madame Bovary of the Suburbs focuses on a woman (like Flaubert’s heroine) who marries a dull, plodding, timid man ‘a reassuring support’ and subsequently has an affair. When she’s rejected, unlike Emma Bovary, instead of resorting to arsenic, ‘you’, or the character sometimes referred to as M A stays with her husband; and we see her ordinary life unfold from childhood to old age and death, from the era of VHS to iPod, and from suburban 1970s to the present day. This excellent translation by Alison Anderson captures 1970s slang and subtly changes as M A ages.

In this wry take on Flaubert’s masterpiece, written in the strangely intimate but at the same time distancing, almost anonymous second person, ‘you’ are Emma Bovary transposed to the suburban life of the late 20th, early 21st century. Nothing has really changed from the 19th century; in a materialistic world women’s lives are still marked by the struggle between freedom and comfort. As a mother, ‘you’ have to ‘conscript your body in the service of the smooth operation of the family machine…overwhelmed by the bodies of others.’ Ultimately, in this very French novel, this conflict results in an existence where something is always missing; and you constantly look for the ‘tug of novelty’ to give your life meaning, whether it’s through work, children, affairs, material goods, yoga or art. This struggle to feel fulfilled, results in an existence that is absurd. The human condition.

Although we believe we’re all unique and individual, the patterns, set by social norms, by child-rearing, by ageing and by our own personalities, are inescapable; ultimately, we find we have become our parents. Then it starts all over again: ‘another pregnant woman will come to live under this roof.’

In this surprisingly moving book Sophie Divry shows us that if we always expect life to consist of ‘intense’ experiences, we’ll be disappointed. Until we realise that life is made up of ‘the present tense of a sentence in which one is breathing, not on an event situated in the future’, we are doomed to frustration and after every new experience we’ll find ourselves ‘standing disappointed in front of the refrigerator.’ Madame Bovary of the Suburbs is a profound, modern, ironic take on the human condition.

MA is a frenchwoman born in the 1950s in a small village close to Chambery. She is an only child of hard-working but not affluent parents and she studies hard. Leaving University with a degree she chooses to marry her college sweetheart and takes a job in a local company that allows her to raise her family. She is bored and frustrated so begins an affair with a married colleague which does not end well. MA is hospitalised, undergoes counselling and throws herself into a variety of activities, all with the aim of replacing the ennui in her life.

It took me a while to get into this book as the writing is unusual, spare and with a dispassionate tone that gives a very precise cadence. MA is not a sympathetic figure at all but the book is surprisingly sympathetic.

I struggled to get into the book because of the writing style, used in the book, it's not a writing style that I have come across before, and is quite unusual , which may appeal to some readers, I think I will try again to read it in a few years time and hopefully I will enjoy it more in the future.

Distinctly French in tone and conception, this is quirky and charming, bleak and deadly all at once. Written in a second person ('you'), the cool narrative voice skewers her subject, an unnamed woman called just M.A., but equally addresses us as the reader, forcing an examination of our own lives. And however much we might consider ourselves different from M.A., there are places where we, surely, recognise ourselves.

Like Flaubert's Emma Bovary, M.A. is on a search for fulfilment which is never quite reached - but whereas Flaubert's heroine in entrapped by bourgeois conceptions of gender and petty economics, M.A., in theory, has the social and cultural freedom to pursue her own goals... only to find herself following Emma's footsteps more closely than she expected. With personal happiness always dependent on something in the future or on someone else - leaving home, a good degree, falling in love, children, the perfect dinner party, a passionate love affair - M.A. moves through life always bored, always searching.

Deceptively easy to read, this is also both philosophical and pressing.

To be posted on Amazon and Goodreads.

What drew me in to Sophie Divry’s Madame Bovary of the Suburbs was its title which promised me a modern Madame Bovary. To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure I would even like it much, holding out no expectations whatsoever. Boy, was I proven wrong.

First things first, the book is written in second person. Now I know that that doesn’t sound very appealing, you would (as I did in the beginning) doubt how good a book in second person could be. But it is. You almost forget the awkwardness you thought the second person narrative would be accompanied by. There’s a lot more going on in the book to focus on that. Besides, it kind of gives the book a uniqueness of its own. It makes the book poetic in the most prosaic of ways, and that’s my favourite kind of poetic in a book.

To briefly summarise the book, M.A., our protagonist, recalls her life from childhood to death in sad, melancholic vignettes. The book is not always sad per se. But there’s an element of sorrow that it is suffused with, that always rises to the surface after every few pages. M.A., our modern Madame Bovary, has always been bored with life, after a few stretches of happiness, becoming despondent, finding no meaning in any of it. She calls it depression much later (even though she is loath to admit that it is depression) but she has had it all her life. Back then, though, when she was still young, a student, nothing was permanent. It becomes something else, something more, something that makes her desperate to change her life only once she’s been married, once she’s had two of her kids, once the passion between her and her husband, Francois, has died, once the domesticity of her life isn’t enough anymore, once her job has become monotonous too, once she realises that everything that her life was supposed to be, everything that she had wanted her life to be, everything that her life did turn out to be, has been nothing but a big disappointment.

She tries all sorts of things to change her life, to make herself feel better, to make something happen – adultery, yoga, therapy, charity work, cultural programmes, to-do lists, manic house-cleaning, and finally, motherhood – but nothing seems to work. Nothing seems to be capable of turning her life around, changing how she feels, taking away the emptiness inside her, the emptiness that makes everything outside her seem unsatisfying, unfulfilling. Till the day she dies, although she stops trying to find an outlet, an escape, although she finds a sort of intimacy to exist between her and Francois, she still feels like she has her entire life.

Now, I love depressing books. I don’t know why, but I really do. So just the melancholy that seems to be almost ingrained in its pages should have been enough to make me love this book. But it’s not just that. This book, as is evident from its title, is really about a modern Madame Bovary. What was it that Madame Bovary didn’t have, that which would have let her change her life? Independence, autonomy, accessibility to the outside world. Our modern Madame Bovary has all that. What Madame Bovary longed for, a different life, was barred to her. What M.A. longs for is not barred to her. While Madame Bovary was more feminist than anything else, Madame Bovary of the Suburbs focuses more on the psychological aspects. M.A.’s discontent doesn’t come from the barriers outside her; it comes from what’s inside her.

The way the book elucidates depression, portraying it as an illness without ever explicitly calling it an illness, is what I loved the best about it. That is, other than the profound, nonabrasive way in which the failure of a marriage and adultery is described, without any judgements whatsoever.

I highly recommend this book, especially if you loved Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

The English language translation of Sophie Divry's La Condition Pavillonnaire gives the game away in its title. "Here", it seems to announce, "is an updated Madame Bovary; a knowing, ironic version of Flaubert's classic". There's also a sense of bravado in this, especially considering that Madame Bovary has been described as a "perfect novel" - however, to be fair, the book remains true to the promise in its title. It follows the life of the protagonist - the anonymous "M.A." - practically from the cradle (in 1950s France) to the grave (in the mid 2020s). If M.A. has a defining characteristic, it is her persistent feeling of boredom. Her life is a constant battle against ennui.

The novel is in three parts: first part leads us to M.A's marriage to the stable, if unexciting insurance agent Francois; the second part, which is the core of the novel, centres around M.A.'s affair with one of her bosses, an escapade which promises relief from the ordinary but unsurprisingly leaves an aftertaste of sordidness; in the third and final part, the boredom becomes tinged with a sense of panic with the onset of old age.

Divry has a sharp sense of observation and M.A.'s story is told against the backdrop of the French middle-class as it evolved over the past decades. The novel also has its stylistic quirks. It is conveyed, throughout, in second-person narration. This can easily sound awkward, but works surprisingly well in Alison Anderson's deft translation. There are also moments when the narrator seems to adopt a bird's eye view, as if society were a colony of ants under the scrutiny of a biologist or as if the reader were an alien being brought face-to-face with human idiosyncrasies. I have in mind, in particular, a weird 2 - 3-page "encyclopedic" passage about cars, and our fixation with them.

These two points however lead me to my reservations about the novel. It is easy to pity M.A. and see her as a product of a materialistic, male-dominated society. Given the author's feminist credentials it could also well be that we are actually meant to take this view. Yet, rather than making us root for M.A., the objective, almost clinical perspective adopted by Divry makes it difficult to feel sympathy for the protagonist herself. Society is criticized, and often harshly, but M.A.'s seeming lack of interest in the feelings of the persons surrounding her does not earn her many brownie points either (at least, with this particular reader). When this sensation sets in, the second-person narrative starts to feel strident, accusative. Then again, Flaubert's masterpiece is often subjected to the same sort of criticism. Even in this regard, Madame Bovary of the Suburbs, does what it states on the cover.

The synopsis refers to this book as the story of a woman’s life from childhood to death somewhere in provincial France. As the title suggests it is reminiscent of Emma Bovary and the style of the prose certainly conjures her to mind. As the story unfolds I could not but help recall events that occurred in the carriage and wondered how Ms Divry would cover those events. When it did come to the erotic description I was slightly disconcerted. At the back of my mind I remembered how shocking Emma’s interlude was and what a chance she took at discovery. Similarly, our heroine embarks upon an affair with a colleague at work – and they too took risks and the description of their love-making stands out because the rest of the novel is more gracious and I can only presume that this was the author’s intention. In my case it certainly worked.

This is well written and slowly constructs a picture of a changing landscape, in terms of geography, economics and social mores. The characters serve their purpose well; the husband a bit or a bore who needs constant encouragement and support; the lover, who without a doubt in selfish and self-centred, and the heroine who is keen to embark on her life and love who stumbles from one thing to another in a stultifying existence. One of her most redeeming features is the love of her children which in the end makes her life better.

Oh how many women will recognise themselves in some of the descriptions of her existence; a life spent in the service of others; providing for them, supporting them and all taken for granted. Such is life though, made bearable perhaps because we love our family and that is our reward.

Towards the end of the book I was bored. However, I wonder whether this is another strategy of the author a construct to illustrate how boring our heroine’s life has become – and in the end…just nothing. How bleak. I have quickly looked at the text and in the first 15% of the book could find no mention of our heroine’s name – I have no recollection of it at all. Is this too a construct of the author; is she just another nameless woman who seeks validation, recognition, and fulfilment?

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for providing an ARC via my Kindle in return for an honest review.