The Good Wife Strikes Back [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Buchan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 25, 2003

When Viking published Elizabeth Buchan’s New York Times bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, American women saw themselves mirrored in its pages with unique empathy, sophistication, and storytelling flair. It was more than a finely written and irresistible read. It opened up the unsuspected vista of a newer, better than ever phase of life waiting for them. The same readers—and many more, because the word about Buchan has gotten out—will devour The Good Wife Strikes Back.

Forty-eight-year-old Fanny Savage has a nineteen-year record—earned with patience, devotion, and contentment—as the perfect wife to an ambitious, idealistic politician. Life is a whirlwind of public engagements and unquestioning loyalty to the party, to keeping up appearances, and to her husband. Her job description is to look good and remain silent whatever the cost. But as much as she loves her husband and their teenage daughter, Fanny senses within herself a creeping restlessness. Increasingly she feels the fragility of happiness and the part of her she had buried—as the brilliant partner in her father’s Italian winery—begins to resurface. She has given two decades of her life to being the Good Wife—was it worth it, after all? Could it be time for a trip back to Italy? Could it be time for . . . a change?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Fanny, 23, first lays eyes on Will, 28, he is making a speech in his bid for a seat in Parliament. They fall in love instantly, and this latest novel by Buchan (Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, etc.) records the parallel 19-year trajectories of their marriage and Will's political career, the private and the public. Buchan crafts beautiful sentences, which she stacks in airy, digestible paragraphs; yet the novel fails to convey the excitement of the events in Fanny's consciousness that constitute the real plot. She wrestles from first to last page in service of a single question: what exactly does it mean to be good? Fanny wishes to be not just the titular good wife but also a good mother to 18-year-old Chloe; a good daughter to her fiery wine-merchant Italian refugee father, Alfredo; and a good sister-in-law to the alcoholic Meg, who seems to lurk in every doorway. Fanny must also please her husband's political party leaders by appearing in skirts of the correct length and avoiding all substantive talk at state dinners, and she feels duty-bound to reach out to the mother, Sally, who abandoned her at age three to run off to America. Yet these relationships, which constitute the substance of the novel, have scant weight. Even when Fanny makes an impulsive trip to Italy, the story fails to ignite. Buchan's fans will still find much to admire in this thoughtful, intelligent effort, but will hope the author's next springs more vividly to life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

For 20 years, Fanny Savage has been the perfect wife to her MP husband, Will. She has survived the long weeks alone while Parliament is in session and raised their beautiful daughter, Chloe, largely on her own. But as Chloe prepares to leave for university, Fanny feels stirrings of discontent. She misses the life she gave up for her husband and resents Will and his career for what seem to be ever-increasing demands on her. When Will's political life goes into overdrive after a rumor circulates that he is being considered for Exchequer, it causes a crisis in their marriage, and Fanny takes off for Italy. The story of the wife who subordinates her dreams to those of her husband is hardly a new one, but Buchan's note-perfect observations on marriage and its uncertain rewards have a revealing freshness. Like Allison Pearson (I Don't Know How She Does It [BKL S 1 02]), Buchan exposes the obstinacy of old-fashioned expectations within a "modern" marriage, and does so with compassion and humor. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1ST edition (December 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670032808
• ISBN-13: 978-0670032808
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,438,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Delicious, delightful, de-wonderful reading!, August 6, 2004

By 

KatPanama "katpanama" (Readerville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Wife Strikes Back (Hardcover)

This is the third Buchan novel I've read so it's time to confess I'm a fan, and I'm not just waving air. This is a particular kind of wit that was inspired earlier by Fay Weldon and Buchan has done more with it. Buchan's novels are irresistable and mighty tasty reads. There's wit aplenty and intelligence as well as a worldview of interest. This one, "The Good Wife" has to do with a loyal MP's wife who, 20 years down the marriage pike, has to reassess her existence, her life, her marriage. It's quite good indeed.

The other two Buchan books I enjoyed are: Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman and Perfect Love, this latter could have been somewhat shorter (editors note same). Buchan writes entirely fine novels but I dislike her titles which probably help her to sell well so I should shut up. I think the titles diminish the literary quality of the novels which is high.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More Than It Seems, February 14, 2004

By 

Wendy Kaplan (Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Wife Strikes Back (Hardcover)

For some strange reason, Elizabeth Buchan's American publisher has chosen to ignore the fact that she is an award-winning, thoughtful author, and relegate her to the masses of romance novels. Hence the ridiculous title--after her last book, renamed "Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman," do I detect a pattern here? Are American readers too lowbrow to choose a book unless it has a soap-opera title?

No matter. The book is lovely anyway, and more than it seems. It is the careful and often heart-tugging story of a marriage that is not exactly ordinary: Will is a British MP, and his wife Fanny, once a free spirit who ran a wine company with her father, is now the dutiful, adoring wife. Only it doesn't quite work out that way.

Over a series of years and overlapping time periods, we see how the marriage evolves from a crazy-in-love-at-first-sight honeymoon into a real relationship, with all the attendant baggage that comes with it. Will, to my mind, is the most self-centered human being one could imagine, I suppose like all politicians, and it is in his character that Buchan lets us down--I simply could not see why a strong, vibrant woman like Fanny would put up with him. This is explained to us in various months and years of Fanny's adaption to her political life, but it never quite makes sense.

Will's alcholic sister Meg moves in with the young couple almost immediately, and is horribly intrusive throughout the book, and yet the two woman have some strange and yet unmistakable bond. Meg's son Sacha appears at age 16, choosing to live with his mother, and so joins the household that already contains Will and Fanny's only daughter Chloe.

Fanny's father, a wonderful, robust, full-of-life transplanted Italian who loves his vineyard and his daughter with equal gusto, represents the other side of Fanny's character--and so we learn a great deal about her--if not her choices.

I notice that in this version of the book, the publisher took care to change Brit phrases like "jumper" into "sweater," but left "tights" alone. So for those readers who do not know, tights are pantyhose in Britain--it's impossible to imagine Fanny on one of her deadly boring political tea-drinking outings wearing American tights!

Another good book from Buchan--not her best, but well worth reading. Just put a brown paper bag over the title.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Strikes Back? Strikes Out!, February 11, 2006

By 

Poniplaizy (Mount Joy, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Wife Strikes Back (Mass Market Paperback)

I picked this book up and started reading the first few pages and was hooked. It was readable and flowed smoothly, although the way Fanny knuckled under to everyone else's $hit irritated me. She plays like 2nd (or 3rd) fiddle in everybody's life and even though she sometimes complains, she never *does* anything about it. Then, just about the time she gets in a situation where she could empower herself and step out on her own, POOF! Several events occur that just sweep her problems right away. What was that? How did she strike back when she never changed as a person? Why have her get out of her predicament not under her own steam but be "rescued" by circumstances that change her life *for* her? It's almost like the author was given a contract that said, "You can't go over X amount of words," and she was thinking, "Oops, better end the book fast before I run over my quota!"

In sum, if ya wanna see a wife strike back, watch *The Little Foxes,* starring Bette Davis as a woman who knows what the word revenge means and takes it to new heights. Now there's a role model!