HUSBANDS & LOVERS, by Beatriz Williams
Soap operas may be nearly extinct, but their flair for the dramatic lives on. “Husbands & Lovers,” Beatriz Williams’s new work of historical fiction wrapped in a beach read, begins with a series of significant tragedies: a mushroom poisoning, a cobra bite, a slip-and-fall death from the terraces of Machu Picchu. Then there’s a “paternity incident,” a desperate hunt for a kidney and a pilgrimage to an Irish orphanage — across three generations and four timelines.
“Husbands & Lovers” is less about husbands and more about lovers. In 2022, a single mother named Mallory Dunne must stare down the most monumental of her paramours: Monk Adams, a best friend turned boyfriend from the summer of 2008. During this magical season, the two enjoyed a series of unprotected trysts on Winthrop Island (fictional, but inspired by real-life Fishers Island, we learn in an author’s note) before an abrupt and mysterious breakup. Monk is now a famous singer of indeterminate genre (picture a modern-day troubadour crooning from bar stools). He’s newly relevant to Mallory and her 13-year-old son, Sam, after the boy ingests the aforementioned “death cap mushroom,” suffers renal failure and suddenly requires a new kidney.
Williams then presses pause on all of the above to introduce a more engaging, artfully drawn pair of lovers. In Cairo in 1951, Hannah Ainsworth humors her fusty husband, Alistair — a Brit who “devoted himself to the service of empire” — while wandering the Pyramids with a Swiss-Egyptian hotel manager named Lucien Beck. Hannah catches Lucien “looking not at the Sphinx, but at her,” Williams writes with old Hollywood panache. A quietly fierce heroine, Hannah totes a pistol in her pocketbook; having survived the traumas of World War II in Hungary, she isn’t taking any risks. Now, as she observes the mounting political tension in Egypt, she asks Beck, “Don’t you want this country for yourself?”
Williams might have heightened the stakes between Hannah, her husband and her lover, but Hannah’s stolen moments still smolder. Descriptions of tense postwar Cairo are both commanding and detailed: “the smell of fruit and spice and sunshine and dirt and excrement,” “the rage you felt roiling beneath the skin of everything — buildings, streets, people.”
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