When Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” went viral in 2017, it was because it felt disarmingly true. For female readers in particular, the story of Margot and Robert was something they had already lived. It was a kind of benediction to see those vicissitudes of wanting, repulsion and (the most private shame of all) wanting to be wanted, all laid out in clear, neat type: you are known.
When it went viral again this year, it was because one particular reader had decided it was too close to the truth altogether. In an essay in Slate, Alexis Nowicki claimed that “Cat Person” was based on her. Although the main incidents of the story had no parallel with her own life, she shared some key details with the Margot character. Roupenian later confirmed she had known certain things about Nowicki and used them as a “jumping-off point”, but insisted Margot was a work of fiction – which in no way lessened Nowicki’s profound sense of having been “invaded”.
There’s a similar moment of unnerving overlap between fiction and reality in Virginia Feito’s brilliant debut novel, Mrs March. Mrs March (she’s consistently referred to by her married title, even when describing her pre-married life) is the wife of a novelist. She lives a well-appointed Upper East Side life in an unspecified decade of the mid-20th century: a time when women wear gloves, people smoke indoors and unstockinged female legs are a sign of moral decay.
We meet her as she goes about a regular day, preparing for a party – like that other great literary Mrs, Virginia Woolf’s Dalloway. The party, in fact, is a celebration of her husband George’s latest novel, which has become quite the literary phenomenon. Such a phenomenon that the woman who runs Mrs March’s favourite patisserie has read it, and congratulates Mrs March on its success, which she assumes will feel particularly personal to Mrs March: “Isn’t this the first time he’s based a character on you?”
But if Mrs March’s husband intended a portrait, it is not a very flattering one, given that Johanna – the main character – is “a whore no one wants to sleep with”. Mrs March, who is a woman particularly concerned with appearances, feels extreme humiliation at being identified in this way: “the whole world would know or, worse still, would assume. They would see inside her, wickedest of violations.” (The novel is written throughout in this mannered style, which is initially disconcerting but quickly reveals itself to be a deeply satisfying fit with both Mrs March’s fastidious character and the literary era of the setting.)
And what is inside Mrs March? As Feito’s novel goes on, the answer to that question becomes increasingly, gothically disturbing. Under Mrs March’s fine gloves, her hands are ragged. She’s subject to violent impulses: at the party, convinced that the guests are laughing over her resemblance to Johanna, she imagines poisoning them all with arsenic. And there’s a corruption within her: she feels “unease wriggling through her belly like a handful of maggots”. She begins to see cockroaches in her pristine apartment.
There are plenty of reasons for Mrs March to feel unstable. She’s sure that her husband has betrayed her in fiction, but does his interest in the high-profile disappearance of a young woman suggest he’s involved in something even worse? Then there’s the Marches’ strange, hostile housekeeper, Martha: does she have her own schemes in play? (A copy of Rebecca sits on Mrs March’s nightstand, and could be either a portent or a warning.) Feito teases these possibilities with a level of control that would be impressive in any novelist, never mind a first-time one.
Because Mrs March is the reader’s portal to this world, as her reality disintegrates, so does ours. The escalation of subtle grotesqueries creates moments of profound and thrilling unpleasantness: a fish blinking on a serving dish, paintings that transform themselves when Mrs March isn’t looking, the doubles of herself that begin to appear, not only in her husband’s writing but also in the flesh around Manhattan. Her identity is collapsing: she dreams of borrowing other women’s reflections from mirrors and stealing into their homes.
This is a brilliantly tense psychological study from a writer who keeps pace with the grandees she invokes – Du Maurier, for one. It has already been optioned by Elisabeth Moss, who – pertinently – starred in Shirley, a fictionalised take on Shirley Jackson’s life. It’s also a fine addition to the current wave of feminist-inflected horror, which includes Roupenian’s work. But what makes Mrs March most unsettling of all is that Feito’s meticulous construction of a collapsing mental world is underpinned by piercing insight into “normal” minds.
The chilly paranoia that Mrs March experiences, the belief that everyone is judging her as she is judging them, the appalling prospect that she is known not on her own terms, but as someone else has portrayed her – all these are the regular nightmares of the regular status-hungry person in the social media hall of mirrors. And whatever era Mrs March is set in, its menace is subtly current. Feito has done that most horrible, wonderful and truly novelistic of things: she has seen right through Mrs March and into the shameful, petty, maggotty secrets that everybody carries.
Mrs March by Virginia Feito is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
