Jean is not stupid (she is the sort of woman who corrects her husband’s grammar in an argument), and is perpetually self-accusing, as well as self-justifying; but even this is grotesquely self-centred. She sees that she is ‘petty and ungenerous’, and tries to think ‘wholesome, charitable, life-lengthening thoughts’. Life-lengthening for whom? Charity becomes the moral equivalent of eating a high-fibre diet.
One begins to hope this novel will become a tale of moral re-education; and when Jean embarks on a sordid affair of her own, she does seem to be heading for a shaming nemesis. Maddeningly, however, the novel ends with her still in a position to patronise her husband, and doing so.
Though there are plenty of sharp insights and strong images to be encountered in this novel, it becomes a slow-moving and exasperating moral and emotional tangle.
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