Flash, crackle … husband!?
A millenial searches for Mr. Right in a magical attic
Thirty-one-year-old Lauren lives alone in a London flat she inherited from her grandmother. One night, she returns home drunk from her friend’s “hen do” (that’s “British” for bachelorette party) to find a strange man there. She doesn’t know him, but he knows her.
He is, in fact, her husband, the first of hundreds of husbands Lauren will have over the next three-hundredplus pages of Holly Gramazio’s entertaining debut novel, titled — what else? — “The Husbands.”
Lauren soon understands that her ordinary life has been transformed in an actual flash. After her first husband climbs a ladder and enters the attic to replace a light bulb, a new husband emerges. Alarmed, Lauren sends spouse number two up the ladder to search for his predecessor.
As she watches him recede into the darkness, Lauren senses “a moment of movement and brightness above her, like a flash of sunlight through train windows, and a sharp crackle,” after which husband number three descends. Lauren discovers that with each subsequent flash and crackle, she is wed to a new man and the substance of her life has changed.
Gramazio uses the attic as a device to playfully explore her very millennial protagonist’s attitude toward marriage. As each husband offends in some way, Lauren tricks him into the attic, hoping for a superior replacement. With her endless array of choices, she struggles to decide what she prizes most in a mate: Good looks? Money? Companionship?
“He’s a loud eater, and he isn’t quite closing his mouth,” she observes about one candidate, noticing bits of toast in his teeth. She lures him into the attic but regrets it immediately. Was he the best available, she wonders?
With her friend’s wedding looming, Lauren relaxes her standards. “What she needs is not a husband for better or worse but rather a husband for next Saturday,” Gramazio writes with typically succinct wit.
Lauren demands neither a provider nor a future father-of-her-child (as her grandmother’s generation might have), but rather an enviable escort. A coffee-loving, baseball-playing American named Carter arrives just in time. It turns out he’s handsome, competent and sensitive, and Lauren decides he’s a keeper.
After a blissful interlude, Carter unknowingly wanders into the attic on his own while Lauren is distracted. Her quest to find him again in America provides a welcome dramatic turn from the dizzying parade of men.
Lauren’s brief union with Carter offers her a glimpse of marital contentment. She yearns for both a shared history and a certain future with just one person: “She wanted to know that if something went wrong her first thought would be How can I fix this? and not Should I leave?”
Lauren’s steadfast neighbors Toby and Maryam, who offer tea and succor amidst all the swapping, demonstrate that happy commitment is possible between two flawed people. We root for Lauren as she begins to understand this. We want her to find true love.
Gramazio masterfully blends fantasy with realism as she puts a modern spin on the timeless institution of marriage. Although the masculine merry-go-round occasionally becomes tedious, Gramazio tweaks the formula in engaging ways: Lauren cheats, husbands recirculate, a surly stepson shows up.
Lauren learns about each new groom by googling his name and scrolling through texts they’ve exchanged on her phone, which resets with each marriage. Gramazio explores the millennial sensibility not only through Lauren’s thoughts and conversations, but also in amusing rapid- fire sketches of her potential mates. One with pink-tipped hair dons an apron that reads “this is what a feminist cooks like,” while another “prods [Lauren] and says citation needed whenever she says something he considers doubtful.” Lauren promptly rejects both.
Lauren’s attic and the London setting call to mind C.S. Lewis’ magical wardrobe in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” which transports the Pevensie children from World War II-era England to the fantasy realm of Narnia; Gramazio reinforces this connection by costuming Lauren and Carter as Narnia characters for Halloween. In Lewis’ day, young women chose their husbands from a limited pool of males in the neighborhood or village church.
Were their marriages any less happy than Lauren’s will be? Probably not. Lauren’s attic churns out lots of men — but nobody’s perfect.