Naomi Delap
The Grand Affaire is ever the stuff great fiction is made of. Revelling in the cathartic effect of our protagonist’s roller-coaster ride of emotion, we gasp as the first illicit coupling finally takes place, groan as the inevitable disillusionment sets in, heave a sigh of pleasurable anguish when the tale ends in an orgy of pathos and (preferably) bloodletting. Emma Bovary thrashes about in the back of a minicab in Rouen and Anna Karenina flings herself in front of the 8.38 to St. Petersburg…
Mary Zuravleff, however, writes in greener and more prosaic pastures. This time our hero is a married man – and he’s a designer of refrigerator modifications. George Mahoney’s new design colleague, Niagara Spense, is six-foot tall, wears a hearing aid, and has some shit-hot ideas for bringing fridge design into the twenty-first century. She also has an intriguing hobby – trying to find electrical evidence of life beyond the grave using old radio sets marked ‘dead’, ‘deader’ and ‘deadest.’ George can’t stop thinking about her.
Zuravleff’s basic premise – an exposition of a considered infidelity and the emotions that ensue – is promising. How could we not fail to feel for George as he debates how much access he would get to his children if he left his wife, his weathercock emotions spinning him first one way and then the other in an attempt to deal with the minor life crisis that Niagara’s presence has inspired. Lying in bed next to his wife, he muses that “just the thought of taking a step away from her scared and inspired him.”
The skeleton of the story, however, is overburdened with layers of whimsy and significance. Zuravleff manages not only to invent multiple opportunities for symbolism, but also to explain them. George’s lifelong interest in dinosaurs/the weather/refrigerators, Niagara’s mission and the physical/metaphysical debate it generates all combine to create a stranglehold of meaning from whose clutches nothing is allowed to escape.
Having said that, George’s predicaments are gripping enough to carry the reader to the end of the novel, and having got there I look back on it with a certain amount of affection for George, his lovely wife and children and the statuesque Niagara, if not the bloody dinosaurs. The Frequency of Souls is ultimately a readable and quite endearing book. Buy it to take on holiday, but don’t spend £15.99 on the hardback copy. It’s not going to be a priority in excess baggage on the way home.