In Claire Messud’s latest novel, a woman finds out that the object of her unreciprocated love had been cheating on his wife. For years, she had obsessed over him privately, plastering onto his image the idea of a perfect man. The revelation of his infidelity totally ruins the picture, and tears her to bits: it’s like “a hurricane, destroying in minutes the delicately spun and so long preserved shimmering web of her love affair—yes, she’d considered it all these years a love affair, though they had never held hands, let alone kissed.
” Given that they had never actually become involved, and that the man was married to begin with, hers is an overreaction; we could say it’s melodramatic. Though the word might evoke emergency-room dramas and the impossible entanglements, evil twins, and fake deaths of classic soap operas, that’s not how I mean it. I’m thinking of domestic stories in which the experience of a moment, a person, or an event exceeds the regular boundaries of life, calling the fabric of reality into question.
I’m thinking of a lonely housewife or a husband tormented by a secret; a depth of experience that turns an ordinary life into an extraordinary one. In the postwar period in the United States, the German-born filmmaker Douglas Sirk used domestic settings to interrogate how the weight of societal convention weighed on people’s lives—just questioning these conventions, his films argued, was enough to blow a person’s life apart. These are the.
