The Husbands (Holly Gramazio)

The Husbands
Holly Gramazio
Doubleday
Fiction, General Fiction/Humor
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: It was late, and Lauren was more than a little tipsy, when she returned home from her friend Elena's bachelorette party to find her husband Michael waiting for her... only Lauren doesn't have a husband, and she's never seen Michael before in her life. But, then, the colors and decor of her London home appear to have changed, and there are pictures on the wall and texts on her phone she doesn't remember, all of which confirm that she is indeed married to this stranger, and has been for some time. She even apparently has a different job, working at some hardware and garden store instead of the local council, with no memory of what exactly she does there. The next day, Michael goes up into the attic to change a light bulb - and a different man comes down, also claiming to be her husband, with yet more changes all around her to accommodate this new, impossible relationship. Lauren never really thought about long-term relationships, or much about her future at all, but now, thanks to some mysterious power in her attic, finds herself living a succession of could-have-been lives with could-have-been spouses, some better matches than others, only lacking the memories of what led the could-have-been hers to make their choices. Can she ever get back to her old, single life, the one she alone remembers? If she can't, can she ever decide which of these men, which of these lives, are her destiny?

REVIEW: Part alternate-reality jaunt, part exploration of relationships and the societal myth/expectation of "soul mates", part the story of a woman forced to examine a life lived too long in neutral, The Husbands has an interesting concept, but doesn't always seem certain what its main character is doing with it.
Lauren starts out not particularly wanting much of anything from life, coasting along in a so-so job with a decent circle of friends, watching from the sidelines as they pursue goals and experience life changes while she hasn't substantially moved ahead in anything but years. She's never wanted a family (a conviction that does not change) and never really felt interested in finding a spouse, so she's as confused as she is frightened to find a stranger in her home who claims to be a husband... and an attic that seems insistent on supplying her with new spouses, along with new lives in which she chose them - some of which are poor choices, including a few potential emotional abusers, at least one clearly picked for the money, and more than one run with an ex which never ends well no matter how many alternate-Laurens apparently thought differently. What triggered this? There's no explanation, but the fact that it all began after her best friend's bachelorette party may hint at some metaphysical manifestation of a subconscious desire for a life partner, or at least some definitive direction or change. In any event, once she figures out what's going on, and that her world shifts with each new husband (time itself does not reset), she starts treating the succession of men almost as disposable home decor or rental cars, trying out lives with them for a few days or weeks before sending them back to the attic from whence they came. She's no more serious about choosing a mate or a future than she was before the strangeness started, dabbling in this or that alternate life without really learning or growing, let alone considering how the circle of people around her are also shifting (albeit unknowingly) into new configurations, not always for the better. When she finally finds one she thinks she might stay with, the American-born Carter, she's heartbroken when he ventures up into the attic himself and disappears... only to discover that Carter still exists in her new life, though he's back in America and they never met. Eventually, she finds an Australian-born man named Bohai coming down the attic stairs... a man who also seems to be skipping through alternate worlds, finding different mates waiting for him. The two quickly realize they're not romantically compatible, but are both relieved to have someone to share notes with, someone they can count on to remember each other even when both skip through new lives. Meeting him makes her start taking the matter a little more seriously, but she still has trouble figuring out what she wants to do, what future she wants to grab before it slips through her fingers via fate or her own indecision. Is there ever a true soul mate waiting to be found, a perfect life that's about to drop out of the sky (or attic) to land at her feet, or does Lauren finally have to take the reins and some responsibility, make some decisions and set some goals, and stop letting her life just happen to her? Is there even some great life lesson to be learned, or is this just a weird glitch in the multiverse that just happens to some people? By the end, there's still a lot of ambiguity, and Lauren may or may not have learned much from her experience.
There's some humor in the story, and some exploration of what it means to make choices and live one's life with intention rather than simply waiting for it to happen. The men often being interchangeable objects is a nice twist on the way women are too often seen as window dressing or commodities in marriages, something to acquire to bolster status or serve a purpose rather than being a human being. There is also some needed deconstruction of the idea of "soul mates" and "the one and only forever", and even the idea of marriage itself as a necessary milestone in life; many of the men who come down from the attic could be perfectly suitable partners for life, and at some point some Lauren obviously considered them all a potential "one and only forever", only no life offers perfect bliss without drawbacks, no relationship immune from trouble either before or after the attic switchover. (She is dismayed to find that she's cheating in more than one alternate life, and also that she apparently did not see or chose to ignore serious moral or even legal failings with her picks.) Lauren, unfortunately, just isn't always an interesting or even necessarily likable character to follow through the multiverse, often frustratingly resistant to seeing the obvious, and long stretches of the tale don't seem to go anywhere. That, plus an ending that felt less punchy or decisive than it should have been, ended up holding the story down in the ratings.

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