Roxy

By Esther Gerritsen

Translated by Michele Hutchison

World Editions     2019

188 pages     Literary

We meet Roxy, young wife and mother of a 3-year-old daughter, Louise, just as she finds out that her husband, a famous movie producer, has died in a very compromising situation with his young female intern. Roxy has been with Arthur since she was seventeen—"took a short-cut to adulthood.” Basically, she is still a child in a mother's body.

Roxy is a writer as well as a wife and mother. She had some success with an autobiographical novel, The Trucker’s Daughter, but her next two novels fell flat. There is much she doesn’t understand about herself or her husband, and she had been struggling to hold herself together for her young daughter, even before her husband died.

Her husband’s assistant, Jane, the babysitter, Liza, and Roxy’s parents try to come to the rescue, but Roxy is spiraling out of control. Finally, bizarrely, she decides to take the two women on a road trip with little Louise as a way to start again. The whole road trip experience is shattering for Roxy. The women are critical of her and her parenting, even as they try to remain upbeat and move forward with the plan; her parents try to be helpful, but she doesn’t know how to respond to their renewed interest in her; and Roxy wants to be the best possible mother to Louise, while at the same time behaving recklessly toward her.

It is really hard to like Roxy. Thank goodness the book is short, or I would have strangled her, like Jane and Liza seemingly want to do. At the same time, I couldn’t stop reading. What uncomfortable thing was I going to read next. Ah, well! There is one more totally inexplicable event before the book ends and Roxy somewhat comes to her senses.

Grief is a strange thing. It is a process more than a “thing,” and while Roxy’s behavior is on the far end of strangeness, the sudden catastrophe in her life certainly set her off. My initial interest in the book came from Roxy’s decision to go on a road trip to start anew. I did the same thing when my husband died; my young children and I went on a three-week road trip in an effort to create a new family. Our trip, however, worked out better than Roxy’s. I was a bit older than her, and my husband’s death wasn’t sudden.

Esther Gerritsen is a well-known Dutch author. The Kirkus reviewer calls her style, “deadpan comic,” and occasionally the reader sees glimmers of that humor. That same reviewer, however, closes the review by saying, “A diverting absurdist parable more shocking than memorable.” I guess I would say the same.