Strange Fits of Passion

This is a thriller of a story that has all the ingredients to qualify as an electric "page turner".The setting of a small coastal town in Maine is eloquently depicted by the author as a refuge for Maureen, the physically and emotional abused wife of Harrold. It is 1971, and we are compelling introduced to a marriage going disturbingly awry.Fueled by alcohol and unresolved childhood abandonment issues, Harrold quickly moves through the stages to be a full-fledged spousal abuser. He is an up and coming New York journalist and moves to seduce the new employee at his office. Maureen, being the newly employed journalist is beautiful, idealistic and malleable. Harrold begins his abuse predictably. Remorseful at first, he promises that the abuse will never happen again. Of course, they do and the empty promises continue while Maureen prays that indeed, this will be the last time. Through courtship, early marriage, pregnancy and post partum, the cycle continues and the tension mounts. Maureen, unsupported and isolated, frightened and repeatedly threatened by her husband suffers for herself and her infant daughter. Fearing for her daughter after one horrific beating, she is finally motivated to escape. Waiting for her husband to lapse into alcoholic unconsciousness, bleeding and literally beaten to a pulp, she takes a few possessions, the baby, and the money in her husband's pocket. She escapes into the night to drive north to any destination far enough away from the hell she has been in. The story shares how the people in town were effected by this young woman with a baby. Maureen changes her name and tries to blend in to the anonymity which she needs to have to elude her husband. The consequences of her actions leave the town changed forever. Unfortunately, at this time in social history, spousal abuse awareness was in it's infancy and support for the victims virtually absent. The majority of people chose to ignore the obvious signs and symptoms, justifying their inability to intervene with morally contrived comments that it was somehow inappropriate to interfere in any "man's" personal family life. For the victim, it was truly a nightmare of immense proportion and social isolation.The book is a remarkable insight into the mindframe of a 1970's victim, abuser, family and bystanders. Group readers will have plenty to grieve, celebrate and expound on. This is a thought provoking novel that continues after the book has been finished. I felt the title even revealed the misunderstanding of spousal abuse at the time. Justified as passion, a man was legislatively allowed to "rape" his wife. I can hear the old statements "she threw a fit" and needed to be "knocked into place." This is when passion and emotions cross the proverbial line and Anita Shreve makes it crystal clear that it is nothing but what it is - abuse.

This book pulled me in from the first page, something that happens rarely. I just re-read this book and found it every bit as good as before. Shreve's talent is to write in such a way as to make the reader care so much about her characters and the outcome of the story. Set in the 1970s when abuse was rarely discussed, and if it was, only in private in hushed voices. It was as though the women being abused had done something shameful. This is why Maureen/Mary flees her abusive husband, with her baby, and seeks refuge by hiding in a small Maine coastal town. Yet she still lives in fear --the fear of being discovered. Shreve's description of the place remained with me for the years between my readings of this book. The bleakness of the landscape, the cold......all were so very real.This powerful novel was written from the viewpoints of a newspaper reporter who wrote about Maureen/Mary, the people of the town, and Maureen/Mary's own letters. Through their voices, Shreve reveals the story and allows the reader to interpret it and decide what, if anything, is the "real truth".

Like many of Anita Shreve's novels, the structure of this book seems to have started as a writing assignment Shreve might have assigned as a college professor. The story begins with with Helen Scofield, an experienced journalist who began her career at a prominent weekly news magazine, visiting a young college co-ed. Helen has come to turn over her research and notes from a famous story she wrote decades earlier about the girl's mother. While we don't know the details, it is clear that the magazine piece had a profound effect of the family's life and that Helen has second thoughts about the story she wrote. The research consists of transcripts and notes from Helen's interviews with Mary Amesbury aka Maureen English, a former colleague at the magazine, and those who knew her during her brief stay in St. Hilaire on the Maine coast. It quickly becomes apparent that the subject of the piece is domestic abuse, as seen through the lens of the prejudices and ignorance of the early 1970s. Shreve lays out the facts in the "research" and allows us to hear the original voice of the relevant characters and come to our own conclusions about what happened and why. At the end of the book we get to read Helen's original article and consider the accuracy and sensationalism of Helen's take on the story. The structure of the book certainly makes it a fascinating read, but equally noteworthy are Shreve's lyrical prose and vivid descriptions of the Maine shore. One constant in all of Shreve's books is her obvious love for and familiarity with the rugged New England coast and the people who live there. All in all, this is a wonderful book, challenging, intriquing, thought-provoking. You'll be glad you read it.

Anita Shreve does it again with Strange Fits of Passion, a story in which the main character is a victim of violent physical abuse. Maureen English meets Harrold at her place of employment as a reporter in New York City. They immediately begin a relationship and marry within a year or so. Their relationship is characterized by heavy drinking and erotic sexual experimentations which all seem harmless for a time. Until the beatings begin. And they only get worse as time passes. Maureen becomes pregnant and has baby Caroline and, still, the violence continues, spurred on by inane jealousy, over-drinking or losses of temper. Once Maureen runs away only to return scared and ashamed. The second time she leaves, however, after a particularly bad scuffle, is for good. This time she drives with their baby to Northern New Enland where she knows noone and risks discovery less quickly. Yet she lives in the fear that he will eventually find her and, this time, she knows he will kill her. Told from the point of view of a reporter who later writes a book based on Maureen's story, the reader views letters Maureen has written that act as interviews, and later on, the newspaper article written on the basis of these interviews. Scary suspenseful, and emotionally demanding, Shreve has once again won my utmost respect and admiration as a modern novelist.

Fans of Shreve's other novels, including The Pilot's Wife and The Weight of Water, will appreciate this earlier effort, which, like the others, combines mystery and marriage to create a suspenseful, intriguing story about trouble. Like Anna Quindlen's novel, Black and Blue, Strange Fits of Passion revolves around a young mother who has taken her child and fled an abusive husband to settle in a new community and begin life again under an assumed name. The similarities end there, however, as Shreve builds a more complex, thickly layered story that involves numerous points of view and dips in and out of the past without ever becoming confusing or dense. The novel begins with a magazine writer, Helen Scofield, traveling to a college dormitory to visit Caroline English, the daughter of writer Maureen English, a woman who, we soon learn, was imprisoned for murdering her allegedley abusive husband, Harrold, also a writer, many years earlier. Helen's visit is, ostensibly, to deliver to Caroline the letters and transcripts that she collected as she investigated the murder for an article she was writing. We read of the relationship between Maureen English and her husband from her own point of view--reports of the abuse she suffered, the life she led in the small Maine fishing village to which she fled, and, later, the details of the event that took her husband's life. Interspersed with her memories are the reports from various members of the fishing community she lived in--people who variously report on Maureen and her life there, and who hold her responsible for the crime to varying degrees. Finally, we read the article Helen wrote about Maureen English, her marriage, and her decision to kill her husband, and learn an entirely other lesson about what the truth is and what it means to tell the truth. This is a fascinating, engrossing story.