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Attachment | 
 enlarge | Author: Isabel Fonseca
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
Buy New: $13.48
You Save: $10.47 (44%)
New (32) from $13.48
Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 53485
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.5
ISBN: 0307266915
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780307266910
ASIN: 0307266915
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
The author of the classic Bury Me Standing now gives us a riveting first novel that reaches from the Indian Ocean to London and New York, and into the most confounding precincts of the human heart.
Jean Hubbard is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over—but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious e-mail correspondence that propels her on to alarming, and illuminating, adventures of her own in her adopted home of London and her native New York.
Assured, funny, tender, and provocative, Attachment is unflinching in its depiction of desire, of the responsibility that comes with age and family, and of the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Very disappointed June 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read Fonseca's non-fiction study of the gypsies, which had an engrossing subject but was not well organized. I had hoped that her interesting life had led her to write engaging fiction, and I was moved to buy the book after reading about it in the New York Times.
From the start, I was not at all convinced by the character's behaviors. I needed much more psychological background about what would drive a woman to pretend to be her husband and correspond with the "other woman." It is unclear why the woman chooses not to confront her husband.
The characters of this book did not feel fully evolved. The dialogue, especially that of the American characters, did not read as truly American in style. Much of what they said resembled English phrasing (where Fonseca now lives) rather than American. When the characters are in New York, one should feel that through the language.
Characters in the book exit and enter scenes clumsily. Sometimes someone has seemed to have left the scene, but suddenly, there they are again. I beleive the editors did Fonseca a disservice by not catching more of these little inconsistencies.
I was really ready to enjoy this book, but is feel flat with me. I really tried to make myself read it, but why, I am not sure.
Endless Puff May 25, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Having read the endless puff about Fonseca in the New York Times and other publications, I was expecting a graceful and intelligent piece of work. Attachment is neither. How this talentless woman ever got this book published in the first place is beyond me. (Marriage to a famous author, anyone?)
 Don't read all of this review May 22, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a clever sophisticated contemporary novel about adultery, told SPOV by the (possibly) injured wife. It's more serious than Updike but funnier than Othello or Madame Bovary. The multiple misunderstandings could be played for farce but there's some heavy duty philosophizing about sexual morality with stuff from Dworkin and Rawles and Elizabeth Anscombe. The scene-setting is great, in Mauritius, London and New York. I shall never ride from Gatwick to Victoria or walk along West 168th Street with the same eyes.
Don't read any more if you object to ad hominem (or ad feminam) comments but there's a lot of literary gossip connected with this book.
Fonseca is an ex-wife of Martin Amis, who is the son of Kingsley Amis. His name was at one time coupled with that of Auberon Waugh (Evelyn Waugh's son) as being one of the undeservedly successful progeny of the famous. His first novel, "The Rachel Papers" was plagiarized as "Wild Oats" by Jacob Epstein, the son of an editor of "The New York Review of Books." His later alleged rival is Julian Barnes, who is thought to be the basis for a character in Amis's "The Information" which features a female character thought to be based on Isabel Fonseca.
Attachment is detached May 20, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Attachment is Isabel Fonseca's fiction debut. This is a book about a woman who is, on the surface, pretty comfortable with her life, as a writer living on a remote island with her husband. That is, until she finds a risque letter to her husband. This initiates a whole string of emails between the woman and her husband's lover. The woman seems to be in the midst of a self-image breakdown as she's dealing with insecurity, deceit, dishonesty and manipulation from every relationship she is a part of.
There are almost no developing relationships that really give you insight into who she is, or even was, at some point in her life. There is very little actual attachment in these relationships at all. There are classic appearances of an overbearing mother, an ex-boyfriend, a past lover, and an insensitive and overachieving co-worker. The language used by the main character seems odd in some areas of the book. There are few areas where the basic vocabulary used by the characters were substituted by obscure words the reader will have to look up. Upon reading the book, the reader could become a bit confused as to who the antagonists are. There are quite a few and some even flip back and forth in the end. The ending is a bit unbelievable and doesn't really have much cohesion.
No one likes to be Falsely Accused May 18, 2008
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
It's unclear what the attachment in the title alludes to. Maybe the housewife's attachment to the men in her life and their business partners. Maybe her comfortable life and daughter. Maybe the iridescent humming bird in her garden. Maybe her ideas about herself.
Housewife wonders whether you have to use talent if it was given to you. The men in the novel ponder the issue as well. One man strives. One man believes in equal distribution of the goodies (if that's what "morally arbitrary" means) regardless of talent.
Housewife in the novel traveled the world with her husband, flirting, propagating and writing magazine articles. She has to face her married life assumptions when she opens an email indicating that her husband is having an affair.
Housewife deviously, with spunk, corresponds by email with the skank, pretending to be her husband, then decides to dump the stupid game and never writes back. She has a possible medical problem of her own to attend to and her elderly lawyer father might be dying.
Only Housewife holds herself accountable for wasting the education someone else would have used. No one else seems to mind. I kind of mind. Not about the housewife and the law degree (there are plenty of smart lawyers out there). I mind the harassing, Masters Degree in Molecular Physics housewife who stays home raising her family while there is a war going on. I mind that she uses her degree to put down people who she thinks don't have degrees. I mind that she disrupts your day screaming that you are a terrible driver when you park next to her, right between the white lines, not hitting her van. My impetus for reading the novel was that Housewife was supposedly going to come to terms with her delusions and maybe the world would become slightly more bearable.
This was a revenge read. Who could resist watching big winner housewife find out that the world doesn't perform to her expectations and that perhaps she has sheltered herself from most of the tests? If you never practiced law it's easy to think you would have been an ace lawyer. It's so childish that they think the world is all about women and children and families.
There is pornography out there! And nastiness! And men pay a lot of money for it! Liars! Married guys! There is a whole bad world out there! And if she only tried she could be part of it too.
The liveliest parts of the book are her poor people adventures that she feels smart enough to chicken out on. Did she chicken out of work as well? Who can blame her? Her editor sounds seriously repulsive. She bilks him for a really expensive macaroni and cheese lunch. She is always bilking guys for food.
Even in terms of something as mundane as city transportation she takes taxis everywhere except to the hospital. A man lends her a car for the hospital week. She "spares" her daughter a ride on the London Tube.
I took a taxi a few days ago. It was sort of fun, sort of annoying, bantering politics with the driver. The more we talked the lower the price got. Ironically, the subway seems more private.
It was tempting to not finish the novel. I couldn't figure out who main character was supposed to appeal to. Sick people? The intrigue of medical problems and the family businesses were lost on me. The entertaining aspects of her sex life are not problems for a single person. The vanity the main character reeks of is based on powerful men who wanted to marry her, oh yeah, and her talent. Bully for her.
The author never answers the talent question she posed so many times in any sort of straightforward manner. But why should she? She got published anyway.
I'm not sure women's tendency to mull obsessively over relationship problems is emotionally healthy. If you refuse to limit your mulling this book's for you.
The premise was promising. Housewife finally realizes how clueless she is! And in one way she does. But this novel didn't make a good revenge read. True to type, the housewife gets away with the things housewives get away with.
Don't quit reading before the end. The end is a little difficult in that some of the summary could mean different things with different intonations but it's by far the most fun part of the book.
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