His Lovely Wife [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Dewberry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2006

When tall, blond, and beautiful Ellen Baxter enters the Paris Ritz the day before Princess Diana dies, she's mistaken for her by the paparazzi. The next morning, as Ellen's older, Nobel-laureate husband attends a physics conference, she goes to the site of the fatal crash and finds an uncharacteristic photograph of Diana. Surprised by how deeply the death has affected her, Ellen pockets the photo. As she hears Diana's voice in her head and begins to understand the parallels between their lives, she tracks down the person who took the photograph, hoping that this man who deals in surfaces can penetrate her beauty, as he did Diana's, and help her love the woman inside.

Elizabeth Dewberry's complex, surprising novel uses string theory to weave together two women's lives and explore a culture that celebrates women for their beauty-then exacts a terrible toll.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Beautiful Ellen Baxter is tagging along with her Nobel laureate husband, Lawrence, to a physics conference in Paris when, in a matter of hours, she's mistaken for Princess Diana and then possessed by Diana's just-departed spirit. Ellen has felt unaccomplished, detached, self-deprecating—a "lovely wife" as opposed to a real person. When Diana begins speaking to her from the beyond, Ellen, convinced that they both have lived for and through men, is newly enlivened. The story gains momentum when Ellen decides to pursue a paparazzo she encounters at the site of Diana's accident; her tentative overtures toward Max Kafka intersect with her complex feelings about the princess. When she and Max wind up in bed, Ellen begins to make some sense of her experience with the otherworldly: "It's storming outside, but it feels safe and still and very private here, just Max and Diana and me in this room that's been sealed off from the rest of the world." This perceptive, poignant novel lacks a satisfying conclusion—none of Ellen's conflicts with her past (difficult mother, dead father) or her present (brilliant, remote husband) is resolved—but the channeling of Princess Di lends an interesting new twist to the mid-life wife crisis genre. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

In Dewberry's fourth novel (following Sacrament of Lies, 2001), regal blond Ellen is staying at the Ritz in Paris with her physicist husband, Lawrence, in town to attend a conference. Coincidentally, Princess Diana is also staying there, and Ellen is thrilled when the paparazzi lining the street mistake her for Diana. When Ellen learns of Diana's fatal automobile crash, all of her own insecurities about her intellect and her status as "the lovely wife" assail her. Soon she is fending off the condescension of an acerbic female German physicist, a colleague of her husband's, and channeling Diana's voice in her head as she recognizes the parallels between their lives (difficult mothers, remote husbands)--all of which motivates Ellen to seek out a handsome but conflicted American photographer. In one long and sometimes claustrophobic interior monologue, Dewberry attempts to connect string theory with the all-too-familiar facts of Diana's life. In some ways, her ambition outstrips her material, which may feel more compelling to readers who share the narrator's fascination with Diana. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (March 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151012210
• ISBN-13: 978-0151012213
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,690,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

HIS LOVELY WIFE is my fourth novel, the second one written since I married Robert Olen Butler in 1995. He's much more well-known than I am, and often, especially in the early years of our marriage, we were introduced as, "Pulitzer-prize-winning author, Robert Olen Butler," now a slight pause, and the volume goes down a notch, then, "and his lovely wife, Elizabeth Dewberry." In the beginning I sort of liked it--my first husband was unemployed for the last five years of our marriage, and I was never introduced as his lovely wife--but after a while, I started feeling irritated by it. I hated that I found myself wanting to tell complete strangers whom I'd just met that I, too, was an author, but I felt like I was disappearing. HIS LOVELY WIFE is not autobiographical--I know, all writers say that, and half of them are lying, though in this case, it's true!--but it was easy to find the empathic connection with my narrator, who feels that at least in other people's minds and to a certain extent in her own mind, as well, she feels defined by who she's married to more than by who she is. I'm lucky, though, to have been able to use this experience to take my next step as a writer, which, ironically, means that it helped me figure out something about who I am.

I'm not sure why anybody would want to know this, but it's standard biographical information, and I'm not trying to be difficult, so: I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, received a BS in English from Vanderbilt, and a PhD in twentieth-century American fiction, with a dissertation on Hemingway, from Emory. I've published four novels (or did I mention that already?), and my work has appeared in ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY, SOUTHERN LIVING, THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HEMINGWAY, and MY NEW ORLEANS, among other places. I live outside Tallahassee, Florida.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Ultimately being Miss Anything is just a step on the way to being a better Miss Anything", March 18, 2006

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: His Lovely Wife (Hardcover)

Essentially a story about the place of women in the world, their lives, loves and their passions, His Lovely Wife is also a tale of the importance of beauty and the nature of yearning. The lovely thirty-something Ellen Baxter finds herself in Paris on the morning before the tragic car accident that killed Princess Diana. Ellen's scientist husband Lawrence is attending a prestigious physics conference and both are staying at the Ritz.

One morning, the paparazzi - the same group who chase Diana to her death - mistake Ellen for the famous Princess and later she spies the woman while she's having her hair done in the hotel salon. Although Ellen has never thought much about Diana, she admires the woman's penchant for beauty, fame and fortune. Her discovery that it really was Diana in that car, under that bridge, throws her into a maelstrom of confusion and self-doubt, particularly when Diana's spirit begins to talk to her.

As Diana's voice becomes louder, Ellen also obsesses over Max Kafka, a photographer who put the picture of the Princess on a memorial by the site of the accident. She decides to hunt him down, not because she wants to interrogate him about his involvement, but because she feels strangely drawn to him, her feelings for him somehow tied to her feelings for Diana.

Ellen is unhappy in her marriage and she's the first to confess that she doesn't have a single marketable skill, except that she's "good with people, and loves charities." Her mother, a former Miss Alabama, with her singing ventriloquist act, instilled in her from an early age that life is a pageant, "It's one big long beauty contest and the girl who gets the best husband wins." Consequently, Ellen now approaching middle age has found herself as a sort of "trophy wife" to a brilliant and talented man, who cares little about her emotional well being and ignores her efforts to achieve some semblance of independence.

Everything is just so frenetic for Ellen with everything rushing towards an end: "the summer, the century, the millennium, Diana" - there's also something else coming to an end that she just can't articulate - perhaps it's her marriage to Lawrence. Like Diana, Ellen has spent so much of her adult life trying to figure out what she was doing on the planet and she doesn't think she ever feels like she's finding the answer. It's only when Diana comes to her and tells her she doesn't regret a single act of love, that Ellen can make sense of her own desires.

Author Elizabeth Dewberry cleverly uses Ellen's predicament - and her reaction to Diana's death - to cast a protracted eye on the human condition, and the choices that people make and then regret. The themes are wide and far reaching: The nature of adoration - Diana chose men who gave her what she wanted, and then she did all her charity work to compensate, because she still wanted to deserve it. And the ability to connect - Ellen discerns that we are all intimately connected to the universe in ways we can't explain, and sometimes she feels it, "that infinite yearning for light in my own center, plain as desire."

His Lovely Wife is a very unique and distinctive novel, with its complex observations on the importance of science and the nature of the universe, and its view of a frustrated, lonely married woman with pent-up desires who is ultimately yearning just to connect. Dewberry, by the novel's end, isn't able to resolve any of Ellen's issues, although her journey is fraught with much self-knowledge. It is only through listening to Diana's voice that Ellen comes to the conclusion that life is all about love, "love defines who you are, making you willing to become someone your not, and in the process perhaps even a better person." Mike Leonard March 06.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One darn good storyteller, August 14, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: His Lovely Wife (Paperback)

Ellen Baxter happens upon the site of Princess Diana's death the morning after the fatal crash. There, she pockets an unusual photo of Diana left by a stranger. On her way back to her hotel, Ellen begins to hear the deceased Diana's voice in her head-and her life takes a turn. As she draws parallels between her own life and Diana's, she begins to question herself. As Ellen looks for meaning in her relationship with her older husband, a Nobel laureate in physics, and in her own life as "his lovely wife," she goes on a search for the man who took the photo of Diana. What follows is a surprising, affecting, cautionary tale of the role of beauty and celebrity in the lives of women.

Elizabeth Dewberry's His Lovely Wife is a modern-day fairy tale set within the novel form. Through both flashbacks and telephone conversations, Dewberry touches on the complexities of mother-daughter relationships: Ellen and her mother, a former Miss Alabama, have a touch-and-go relationship much in need of forgiveness. Through Ellen's surprising emotions around the death of Princess Diana, Dewberry raises questions about the strange attraction of the lives of celebrities. And through it all, Dewberry manages to paint a portrait of a real woman, struggling with guilt and desires and trying to find her own place in the world.

The book is alternately heartbreaking and funny, filled with a woman's reflections on beauty and physics, on photography and marriage, on responsibility and desires. In the end, Dewberry raises more questions than she answers, which lends the book an authenticity missing from many chick lit or women's novels.

Dewberry said in an interview: "...when there is something that is really compelling and I have more questions than answers, that tells me that maybe a novel's there." Well, in the end of His Lovely Wife, Ellen Baxter's fate is uncertain, but we do know that she has faced some new truths. Somehow, though the story is quiet and the action mostly internal, His Lovely Wife is nearly impossible to put down.

Armchair Interviews says: When you can't put a book down, that's a sign of a good storyteller at work.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two hefty issues weaved into a brilliant tale, November 21, 2006

By 

Gregory Bascom (San Jose Costa Rica) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: His Lovely Wife (Hardcover)

This review is for the Harcourt hardback edition, 2006, 282 pages. HIS LOVELY WIFE is the fourth novel by Elizabeth Dewberry.

Beautiful Ellen has been married to Lawrence Baxter, a Nobel Prize winning physicist for fifteen years. As the sparks of love fade into distant memories, Ellen wonders if she has become a trophy wife for her famous husband. Their friends seem to think so.

In August 1997, Lawrence and Ellen arrive at the Ritz hotel in Paris where paparazzi briefly mistake Ellen for Princess Diana. While jogging early the following morning, at the site of a recent automobile crash, Ellen happens upon Max Kafka, the handsome American photographer who took her picture the previous afternoon. In an aura of sexual tension, Ellen and Max walk to a makeshift memorial near the crash, which already has a few bouquets of flowers. Max leaves a small photograph there and bids Ellen goodbye. When Ellen examines the photograph, she realizes Princess Diana died in the crash. Shocked, Ellen thinks about Diana and communicates with her spirit. Ellen realizes there are haunting similarities between Princess Diana's life and her own.

HIS LOVELY WIFE is a lyrical, literary journey into the perplexing role of the beautiful wife in the shadow of a famous husband and the nature of afterlife in terms of the theories of the universe. Ms. Dewberry weaves these two hefty issues together seamlessly in a brilliant tale.