(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Is it possible to write a novel that is riotously clever and funny and yet absolutely able to cut right through to the heart of what it means to be human, to love, connect and belong, and to feel lost and alone when that doesn’t going according to plan?
It is, and Holly Gramazio has managed it with highly enjoyable aplomb with The Husbands, a novel that takes an outrageously out-there multiversal premise and makes it feel relatable, honest and grounded in a way that will speak to you in ways you didn’t know you needed.
The Husbands begins in inspired form with a very single, and drunk, Lauren getting home from a big night out with her bestie Elena – she’s getting married and it’s her hens do which means a lot of alcohol and staggering into home is involved – to find a man she doesn’t know sitting on the stairs of her apartment.
He claims to be her husband, and certainly acts as if he knows her very well, but surely Lauren would remember getting hitched to someone? This man can only be a stalker or a weird thief who likes to play games with those he’s stealing from?
But no, there is a slew of evidence, from photos to bills and the inescapable fact he knows her name that backs up the fact that Michael is indeed who he says he is.
‘Hello?’ she calls out towards, she can only imagine, another man, another husband. She steps back, the flurry of novelty revealed as she turns, a new world flicking into place behind her back. The walls have changed again, even though she was pointing the camera at them the whole time. She feels clearheaded — maybe in this version of the world she drank less last night, or maybe things are starting to make sense. A sound from above.
‘What’s it like up there?’ she calls out, wondering who’s going to answer.
He can also cook an amazing bacon sandwich and everyone from Lauren’s sister Natalie and her wife Adele and their kids to next door neighbours Toby Maryam adore him so clearly he’s been around for long enough for them to see as a very welcome part of the landscape of Lauren’s life?
So, just what the hell is going on here?
Husbands don’t just appear out of nowhere do they, changing not only your marital status but even the decor of your apartment and everything from your job to the way everyone interacts with you.
Well normally they don’t but in The Husbands, they do with Lauren’s rather magical attic churning them out like a biscuit factory on overdrive, each one different to the last, some awful, most good and all of them banishing their predecessor and all the transformative ripple effects on Lauren’s life as if they were never there in the first place.
No one else remembers the husbands who came before but Lauren does, and with increasing desperation, she tries to figure out what the hell is going on and how it is, that with her going nowhere at all but the same apartment she’s lived in for years, a host of alternate realities are coming to visit and causing endless havoc by reshaping in ways big and small the very fabric of her existence.
It’s a fantastically loopy idea but Gramazio realises its potential for a real, hard deep dive into the soul, taking Lauren on a journey into not just who she is but what it is she wants from life and the person she shares it with.
(courtesy official author site)
Lauren certainly has plenty of time to get to know the many facets of person that her attic seems to think might suit her with the husbands, some 200+ of them, offered to her running the gamut from friendly expert chicken wrangler to a man who loves double entendres to someone who can calm her down just by holding her close.
There’s a huge mix of men involved, some of whom last an instant – all Lauren has to do is get them to go up into the attic and snap, crackle and lightbulb pop, another man takes their place – others weeks but none of them last the distance, with some of them even wrecking the lives of those near and dear to her, simply their arrival remaps Lauren’s life down to a frighteningly granular level.
While the idea of an endless conveyor belt of husbands might be fun, and in the context of The Husbands it often is to an extraordinarily joyful degree, it comes with some major challenges and not just when the husband of the moment is darkly misogynistic or cruelly uncaring.
Whenever it’s so easy to get someone new, you don’t have to out the work in to find out who really suits you and who doesn’t because while some of the husbands are demonstrably not fit for purpose, many others are agonisingly close.
How then do you who The One is? All of them? Some of them? None?
One husband wakes her up in the morning by sitting astride her and spraying her in the face with the plant mister (plastic, from the gardening shop, this time). She struggles and splutters, shocked, but assumes that it must be normal, a thing they do, so she controls herself quickly and tries to cover the anger with a laugh.
‘Wow,’ the husband says, “I should do that more often, I thought you’d hate it.’
Not just a thing they do, then. She sends him back.
Lauren ends up in the hugest of all existential crises, and while she does have some fun from time to time, even leaning into several marriages thanks to the encouragement of a mysterious new friend, in the end it begins to wear on her as these cleverly imaginative and brilliantly original novel begins to ask some fairly tough questions, none of which Lauren has the answer for.
One of the things that makes The Husbands such a pleasure to read, and honestly you will have SO much fun with this one, is how Gramazio expertly balances the more outrageous elements such as a magical attic and a reality-bending multiversal plot driver with the novel’s more thoughtful aspects.
Neither cannibalises the other, and so you end up with an inventive story that goes to some very strange places indeed which never forgets how real and very human life can be.
It all means that this witty, insightful novel has you laughing out loud seconds before you fall into a deeply ruminative moment, and wondering all the time how on earth you’d navigate the consequences of a such a bizarre set of circumstances running amuck in the once clearly defined environs of your life.
The Husbands is pure reading joy, not simply because of its audacious, expertly and fulsomely realised premise but because it dives deeply and insightfully into how well we know ourselves, who we would be best with and what our life should look like, and reveals that maybe in an age of endless digital smorgasbord of possibilities, we should think less, feel more and act on our instincts and let the chips, and yes, the husbands, fall where they may.