All He Ever Wanted

Anita Shreve’s All He Ever Wanted reads like Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own told from the perspective of the husband. The wife gains a measure of freedom, but how does the repressive, abandoned husband feel about that freedom? Set in the early 1900s in the fictional New England college town of Thrupp, and narrated by the pompous Nicholas Van Tassel, All He Ever Wanted is at once an academic satire, a period novel, and a tale of suspense. Shreve’s ability to nimbly hop through genres brings a liveliness to this story of love gone depressingly wrong. Van Tassel is an undistinguished professor of rhetoric at Thrupp College and a confirmed bachelor when he meets–in no less flamy a scenario than a hotel fire–the arresting Miss Etna Bliss. Immediately smitten, he woos and wins her. At least, he persuades her to become his wife. But Van Tassel hasn’t really won her. Etna keeps her secrets and her feelings to herself. The extent of her withholding only becomes clear after a couple of kids and a decade or so of marriage. Then we find out that she’s been creating a secret haven for herself all along. Van Tassel is in turn revealed–through his own priggish, puffed-up sentences–as something of a monster. The book is cleverly done; watching Etna through Van Tassel’s eyes is like looking at beautiful bird from a hungry cat’s point of view. But Van Tassel’s voice might be too well written; he’s pedantic and dull and snarky all at once, and by the end we find that we, like Etna, can’t bear his company a minute longer. –Claire Dederer