Attachment by Isabel Fonseca

From the Publisher

The author of the classic Bury Me Standing now gives us a riveting first novel that reaches from the Indian Ocean to London and New York, and into the most confounding precincts of the human heart.

Jean Hubbard is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over—but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious e-mail correspondence that propels her on to alarming, and illuminating, adventures of her own in her adopted home of London and her native New York.

Assured, funny, tender, and provocative, Attachment is unflinching in its depiction of desire, of the responsibility that comes with age and family, and of the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.

The New York Times - Helen Schulman

Attachment is a confident, smart first novel about cultivated people with cool jobs and multiple homes, with a story that seems personal and deeply felt…Fonseca tells her story with such specificity and acuteness, and in such nicely rendered climes, that Jean's stumbles seem like news bulletins…Fonseca's cast is a bumbling crew of affectionate and selfish pleasure seekers, full of battered egos and insatiable needs—we may not always admire them, but they sure are interesting to watch.

Publishers Weekly

In a compelling fiction debut, Fonseca takes syndicated health columnist Jean Hubbard, an Oxford-trained lawyer, through a dramatic demonstration of the limits of attachment. Jean is filing her columns from the remote Indian Ocean island of St. Jacques, where her advertising-genius husband, Mark, has moved them. Their time there is disrupted when Jean intercepts a salacious letter from Mark's London office, which leads her in turn to an e-mail signed by a lubricious "Giovana" (Jean immediately notices the odd single n ). The e-mail features explicit attachments, and without reflecting on the consequences, Jean, writing as Mark, begins an e-mail correspondence with Giovana. Ensuing events occur in a beautifully orchestrated dramatic arc, drawing in Mark's unscrupulous business partner; Jean's stricken father in New York; Mark's first love's daughter; Jean's former beau; and the secret that pushes the 23-year marriage further toward the precipice. Fonseca's nonfiction Bury Me Standing drew a vivid portrait of the international Gypsy community, and she shifts locales and emotional registers with evocative ease here, delving deeply into her ensemble's motivations. She's as unsparing of their flaws as she is frank about their desires. (May)

Eleanor J. Bader - Library Journal

The nature of attachment-or, more accurately, detachment from self, spouse, career, and family-forms the skeleton of this meditative first novel from Fonseca (Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey). Meandering and thoughtful, the book is divided into three sections and moves among a lush tropical island, London, and a bustling Manhattan gripped by post-9/11 edginess. The tale revolves around Jean and Mark Hubbard, a long-married couple on sabbatical in picturesque St. Jacques. When Jean inadvertently intercepts an email meant for her husband, the contents send her reeling. Is he having an affair? How long has it been going on? And why? As Jean begins sleuthing, she undertakes numerous deceptions that force her to access how she feels about commitment, monogamy, and revenge. Along the way, issues of female aging come to the fore, even as the need to care for elderly parents smacks head-on into letting go of a college-aged child bursting for independence. Intense and realistic, full of sexual imagery and churning emotion, this work is highly recommended for all fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews

A busy first novel from Fonseca (Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, 1995) depicts a wife grappling with infidelity (her husband's and her own), mortality and responsibility. Although it moves from St. Jacques (a tiny island in the Indian Ocean) to London, then to New York and back to St. Jacques, the book essentially charts domestic territory as it follows American-born Jean Hubbard's quest for wisdom in her marriage and life choices. Despite a dazzling law degree, Jean set her career aside to marry young. Her British husband Mark now runs a flourishing ad agency, daughter Victoria is at university and Jean writes about health for women's magazines. But during a sabbatical on the island of St. Jacques, Jean's sense of certainty begins to waver after she discovers e-mails (and photo attachments) from Giovana, apparently Mark's lewd young lover, and also confronts the possibility of breast cancer. Keeping both developments a secret, Jean returns to London and-even more inexplicably-spends a night of amazing sex with Mark's office deputy. Then it's on to Manhattan where her father's recuperation from heart surgery has turned critical. Fonseca relies on Jean's internal musings as her narrative vehicle, but this method doesn't successfully unite the heroine's intellect with her actions. Oddly, Jean's passivity pays off when a tumbling sequence of revelations brings on a redefinition of both past and future. A witty, intelligent but uneven debut, weakened by its occasionally exasperating heroine and a conclusion that boils down to less than expected. Agent: Andrew Wylie/The Wylie Agency

Product Details

• ISBN: 0307266915
  
• ISBN-13: 9780307266910
• Format: Hardcover, 304pp
• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Pub. Date: April 2008
• Sales Rank: 20,827