Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, April 14, 2007

Daniel Fielding is a fifty-five year old married publishing executive who as Adultery begins has just finished attending the Frankfurt Book Fair, an annual trade fair which attracts writers, members of the publishing industry and media from all over the world. On an impromptu trip to the south coast of England following the fair, Fielding begins an affair with a younger colleague, Denise Crowder. On just the second day of the affair the two are parked in a rental car in a parking lot adjacent to a beach, sleeping off some post-coital exhaustion. Denise leaves the car briefly to pee, and never returns. Her body is found a day later, when police are led to it by a recently parolled sex offender living in the area. In quick succession, Fielding is required to: (a) explain to police what he and Denise were doing in the parking lot, and how it was he was sleeping when she disappeared; (b) identify Denise's body; (c) call his wife at home in Toronto, explain to her what has happened and warn her of the impending media circus; (d) call Denise's mother to tell her her daughter has been murdered; and (e) make the necessary arrangements to have Denise's body flown back to Ontario.

Since all the action described above happens in the first one hundred pages of the book, Adultery is neither a thriller nor a murder mystery. Instead, this is a novel about aftermath -- about how the characters (especially Fielding, but also his wife and fifteen year old daughter, and Denise Crowder's mother and brother) set about repairing their lives following this emotional catastrophe. It's riveting subject matter for anyone drawn to stories about how human beings relate to one another (this was palpable at the 2004 Vancouver Writer's Festival when Richard Wright read the passage in which Fielding prepares to call his wife, and stopped just at the moment Fielding picked up the phone). But Adultery doesn't provide the reader with much to chew on, beyond setting up a ghastly fact situation and making one very, very grateful not to be standing in Fielding's shoes. In fact, there's an emotional aridity to Fielding's plod through the events following Denise's murder that isn't sufficiently explained by his character's WASPy roots, nor by shock or dissociation (there's no hint that the latter two are what's going on), which just left me feeling that something is missing in the writing. Adultery is like a line drawing which hasn't been coloured in, and I wanted to know more about the specific colours of the characters' feelings.

You can read a review of Adultery in Quill & Quire here.