The day her 17-year-old twins leave for college, Eva Beaver locks the door behind them, climbs the stairs to her bedroom, and gets under the covers, shoes and all.
She's tired of being in charge of cooking cleaning and laundry and bill-paying and everyone's social life and making doctor appointments and entertaining people she dislikes and gardening and just generally adulting. So when she gets a telephone call, a few hours into her self-imposed exile, revealing that her husband has for years been carrying on an affair with a co-worker, it simply reinforces her plan to simply stay in bed and think about things.
The first half of the book is mostly funny. It's obvious that Eva has spoiled both her husband and the twins to the point that they are incapable of navigating the quotidian details of life on their own. Brian Beaver's attempts to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, via a split-second timetable and a computerized preparation / presentation schedule, goes hilariously awry as he attempts to juggle 17 courses, his mother, his mother-in-law, his lover, his twins, a narcissistic house guest, and assorted neighbors.
As the book, and Eva's year, continue however, things get darker and one cannot help but wonder why her family continue to cater to her oddities even as they resent the disruption it's causing. After asking, unsuccessfully, for assistance in managing the realities of her bodily waste, she indulges in a bit of magical thinking that allows her to walk The White Path (a folded sheet, tucked under the edge of the mattress) to the en suite toilet facilities, but still âcan'tâ get out of bed because she âknowsâ if she gets up, if she puts her feet on the floor, she will slowly be drawn back into the life she is trying to abandon. With that immediate problem resolved, Eva goes back to bed with the full expectation that someone will continue to prepare and deliver her meals, take away the dirty dishes, and otherwise meet her needs as she concentrates on mining her memories and thinking about things.
Eventually, word gets out about the strange happenings within the household, and Eva becomes a celebrity in spite of herself. This is the point at which things begin to really twist, and the friends and family who have â with varying degrees of enthusiasm â been serving her needs begin to lose their own lives in the service of The Woman in the Bed.
Eva's connection to reality becomes more and more tenuous even as her husband's affair collapses and he drifts into a more malignant one and her children's narrowly-focused brilliance lead them away from normality. The question is not so much whether anyone can rescue Eva as whether anyone still wants to.
Enjoy the humor of the early book, relish the spot-on observations of hypocrisy and family dysfunction in the middle, but be ready for the darkness that seeps into the last third of the book.
She's tired of being in charge of cooking cleaning and laundry and bill-paying and everyone's social life and making doctor appointments and entertaining people she dislikes and gardening and just generally adulting. So when she gets a telephone call, a few hours into her self-imposed exile, revealing that her husband has for years been carrying on an affair with a co-worker, it simply reinforces her plan to simply stay in bed and think about things.
The first half of the book is mostly funny. It's obvious that Eva has spoiled both her husband and the twins to the point that they are incapable of navigating the quotidian details of life on their own. Brian Beaver's attempts to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, via a split-second timetable and a computerized preparation / presentation schedule, goes hilariously awry as he attempts to juggle 17 courses, his mother, his mother-in-law, his lover, his twins, a narcissistic house guest, and assorted neighbors.
As the book, and Eva's year, continue however, things get darker and one cannot help but wonder why her family continue to cater to her oddities even as they resent the disruption it's causing. After asking, unsuccessfully, for assistance in managing the realities of her bodily waste, she indulges in a bit of magical thinking that allows her to walk The White Path (a folded sheet, tucked under the edge of the mattress) to the en suite toilet facilities, but still âcan'tâ get out of bed because she âknowsâ if she gets up, if she puts her feet on the floor, she will slowly be drawn back into the life she is trying to abandon. With that immediate problem resolved, Eva goes back to bed with the full expectation that someone will continue to prepare and deliver her meals, take away the dirty dishes, and otherwise meet her needs as she concentrates on mining her memories and thinking about things.
Eventually, word gets out about the strange happenings within the household, and Eva becomes a celebrity in spite of herself. This is the point at which things begin to really twist, and the friends and family who have â with varying degrees of enthusiasm â been serving her needs begin to lose their own lives in the service of The Woman in the Bed.
Eva's connection to reality becomes more and more tenuous even as her husband's affair collapses and he drifts into a more malignant one and her children's narrowly-focused brilliance lead them away from normality. The question is not so much whether anyone can rescue Eva as whether anyone still wants to.
Enjoy the humor of the early book, relish the spot-on observations of hypocrisy and family dysfunction in the middle, but be ready for the darkness that seeps into the last third of the book.
