"Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex."
Envy certainly appeals to prurient tastes. So much so that I felt I should be carrying it around in brown paper wrapping, rather than just shoving it into my tote bag, as is my habit with books. Or maybe it would be better to have read it aloud on the Wendy Williams Show to a chorus of "Oh, snap!"s and "Oh no he didn't!"s, as Harrison uses every plot twist imaginable to engage her readers. Tragic deaths, adultery, accidental incest and rape are all in there, and I think I've even missed a few.
Maybe the salacious content of Harrison's work is an effort to deflect attention away from the author herself. Yes, this is the same Kathryn Harrison who wrote The Kiss, the memoir in which she revealed having an incestuous relationship with her father decades before Mackenzie Phillips went on Oprah. You'd think such a book would be a career-ender for sure, a point from which no one could move forward either personally or professionally. And yet Harrison has done a remarkable job defining herself by her work and not her past. She's written 11 well-crafted novels, and Envy is among her best.
It's about sex, sure, but the title is Envy, after all. Sex is a tool, a way to gain power and take it from others because you want what they have. The protagonist, William Moreland, is a psychoanalyst steeped in the belief that is Freud's legacy: that you can change your circumstances, your very being, and make your life happier just by understanding it better. Every character in Envy wants what others have. More specifically, they want to take from others what they feel they, themselves, lack. Will has a twin brother, Mitchell, who is absent from the action of the book and lives only in Will's obsessing over who got the better lot in life. From what we read of him, Mitchell feels much the same way and breaks taboo to get what he believes he deserves. Will is envious of others' children, having lost his own son to a tragic accident, and makes quite a mess of his life as a result. The whole book is a mess, in fact. It's a catalog of a chaotic existence, in which people scramble all over each other trying to get the biggest slice of the pie. Only when Will and his wife, Carole, make a silent pact to make the best of what they have can they find some peace and move forward with their lives.
Harrison's novel is a page-turner that will titillate you on all fronts. But it also goes deeper than that. Envy makes a cogent argument about the desperate search for something better that characterizes modern life. We've become so convinced that our lives are totally in our power, that we can have anything we want if we only reach out and take it, that we've lost sight of happiness altogether.
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