This book by Howard Norman is very hard to categorize. The tale is of a young couple totally in love and explores the beginning of their lives together. The wife, Elizabeth, is writing her dissertation on an English author. Her husband, Sam, is trying to finish a novel. They live in a hotel suite and the beginning swings back and forth from their married life to Sam’s visits with his analyst. We know Elizabeth has been murdered, from the first page of the book, by the hotel bellboy.
Sam has written a story about their lives and the murder and it has been opted for a movie. He sells the rights because he is financially desperate. The movie people try time and time again to get his input – but nothing doing. He moves to a small town and makes two good friends (a married couple). He visits the beach every evening and sees his wife there with 11 books. He and his analyst go round and round about whether or not this is real or total hallucination. Finally his talks with his wife lead to her telling him about how the murder happened. This puts Sam around the bend and he ends up institutionalized for a month.
The thing that kept me reading was the humor (also it is a short book) especially between the analyst and Sam and the movie administrator and Sam. I sympathized with Sam’s (I don’t want to say deranged) thoughts, which were quite interesting. Is what we want to see as real, real but only to us? Can we choose between imagination and hallucination?