Breathless by J. P. Smith

Product Details

Synopsis

In this haunting and sensual story, the violent death of a psychiatrist sends his wife on a journey into her hidden self. Jill Bowman, a historian teaching at a university in the Boston area, is engaged in research on the London Plague of 1665. Her life has long been bounded by academic obligations, responsibility for her autistic daughter, and life with her husband, Peter Freytag. As Breathless opens, Peter is discovered dead in a seedy hotel room. But the real intricacies of the story that unfolds are those of Jill herself and her struggles with Peter's sudden death, the secrets it reveals, and the shadowy parts of her own life. Memories surface as she examines her troubled relationships with her mother and sister. She remembers the time thirty years earlier when, after the murder of a neighbor, she lost the power of speech; she reflects on the college affair that led to an abortion; she relives the failure of her first marriage; and most of all she recalls the exhilarating, ambiguous moments from her life with Peter. Although Breathless gives the reader an exceptionally intimate and comprehensive view of this forty-two-year-old woman's life, it also becomes the story of her relationship with the detective in charge of the case, David Resnick.

Annotation

In this haunting and sensual story by the author of The Blue Hour and The Discovery of Light, the violent death of a psychiatrist sends his wife on a journey into her hidden self. Echoing Ian McEwan and Annie Ernaux, Breathless is an interior novel of compelling simplicity and astonishing power.

Publishers Weekly

After opening in violence and unexplained death, this thoughtful, patiently crafted interior novel set somewhere in contemporary New England, quickly relegates its murder mystery to the status of subplot, focusing instead on a new widow's investigation of her personal history and her suddenly altered future. When history professor Jill Bowman learns of her husband Peter's mysterious death (his throat cut with a razor in a seedy hot-sheet motel), she is forced to reexamine not only their relationship but many of the assumptions and conclusions that have led to her current understanding of herself. The revelation that Peter, a discreet Swiss psychiatrist, had been having an affair, further complicates her feelings. As Jill struggles to come to terms with her loss and aids detective David Resnick in his efforts to solve the apparent murder, she contemplates her relationships with her family, students, colleagues and past lovers; with her retarded daughter, Carrie, her late husband and their common friends; and with Resnick, who suddenly is becoming very important to her. Smith (The Blue Hour; The Discovery of Light) writes convincingly of his protagonist and her complex feelings and realizations. Occasional lapses in realism, especially in the dialogue, do not subvert an otherwise polished, insightful and resonant narrative. (June)