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evelyn_bNot to be confused with the Doctor Who episode of the same name, or with River Song or the Aztec lady the Doctor accidentally marries in Season 1, The Doctor's Wife is an adultery story that begins with the title character's brother trying unsucessfully to locate her after she's left her husband, initially for a younger man, but eventually for herself.
There's a prologue where we learn that Sheila has disappeared, and the younger man doesn't know where she is any more than anyone else, and then it swings back in time to tell Sheila's story. What happens: Sheila and her husband Kevin are supposed to be on vacation in France. Sheila's there ahead of Kevin because he's had to stay behind to do doctor stuff, feeling a little relieved because Kevin is kind of a jerk who prides himself on his practicality and makes fun of her for liking books and wanting to go on vacations. She suspects he doesn't actually want to come at all. As a young girl she had some kind of a self or at least the beginnings of one, but she feels like everything interesting about her has been tamped down and soaked through by the dreary persistent drizzle of real life. She meets an attractive young American in Paris, a nice normal guy who shares some of her interests. They hit it off; she skips lunch with her old friend to spend the morning with him, and when she moves to Nice, he takes the train down to see her again.
One thing leads to another (another being plenty of sex) and after a few days Shelia decides she isn't going back. By end, she's removed herself completely from her old life, including her unhappy teenage son, to begin again on her own terms.
There's a move in this book I'm not sure how I felt about. When Sheila's husband surprises her with the American, he locks her in the hotel room and rapes her, then goes on glibly planning for her return home as if that settled it. This allows Sheila to abandon totally any lingering doubts she had about leaving him. She doesn't tell the American or anyone else about it; it's an awful secret between her and the reader, which makes it loom larger in memory than any of the other incidents in the book. It felt a bit like Moore was trying to turn a complicated decision into an inevitable one, while also forcibly cutting the reader off from any sympathy with Kevin (who was already quite enough of a douchebag for anyone) and I didn't like it. Not that such a thing could never happen or could never be done by an otherwise ordinary garden-variety jerk, but real life is one thing and fiction is another, and honestly, I preferred my mixed feelings. But maybe I'm just being squeamish? Other than that I liked it pretty well, though I won't be naming any routers after it.
There are actually two doctors' wives in this book: Sheila and her brother's wife Agnes, whom we see from his perspective as nosy and meddling, as ill-matched to him as Sheila's husband is to her; you get the impression that he understands her disappearance more than he can say or think out loud.
There's a prologue where we learn that Sheila has disappeared, and the younger man doesn't know where she is any more than anyone else, and then it swings back in time to tell Sheila's story. What happens: Sheila and her husband Kevin are supposed to be on vacation in France. Sheila's there ahead of Kevin because he's had to stay behind to do doctor stuff, feeling a little relieved because Kevin is kind of a jerk who prides himself on his practicality and makes fun of her for liking books and wanting to go on vacations. She suspects he doesn't actually want to come at all. As a young girl she had some kind of a self or at least the beginnings of one, but she feels like everything interesting about her has been tamped down and soaked through by the dreary persistent drizzle of real life. She meets an attractive young American in Paris, a nice normal guy who shares some of her interests. They hit it off; she skips lunch with her old friend to spend the morning with him, and when she moves to Nice, he takes the train down to see her again.
One thing leads to another (another being plenty of sex) and after a few days Shelia decides she isn't going back. By end, she's removed herself completely from her old life, including her unhappy teenage son, to begin again on her own terms.
There's a move in this book I'm not sure how I felt about. When Sheila's husband surprises her with the American, he locks her in the hotel room and rapes her, then goes on glibly planning for her return home as if that settled it. This allows Sheila to abandon totally any lingering doubts she had about leaving him. She doesn't tell the American or anyone else about it; it's an awful secret between her and the reader, which makes it loom larger in memory than any of the other incidents in the book. It felt a bit like Moore was trying to turn a complicated decision into an inevitable one, while also forcibly cutting the reader off from any sympathy with Kevin (who was already quite enough of a douchebag for anyone) and I didn't like it. Not that such a thing could never happen or could never be done by an otherwise ordinary garden-variety jerk, but real life is one thing and fiction is another, and honestly, I preferred my mixed feelings. But maybe I'm just being squeamish? Other than that I liked it pretty well, though I won't be naming any routers after it.
There are actually two doctors' wives in this book: Sheila and her brother's wife Agnes, whom we see from his perspective as nosy and meddling, as ill-matched to him as Sheila's husband is to her; you get the impression that he understands her disappearance more than he can say or think out loud.
