The Doctor’s Wife by Elizabeth Brundage

Nothing just happens! You thought about it. You made a decision. Whatever happened to self-control?
— Lydia Haas, The Doctor’s Wife

Some writers make the thrilling substantial. Others make the substantial thrilling. In her debut novel, Elizabeth Brundage merely stops to soil the playing field. Hinged on the attempted murder of an abortion provider, The Doctor’s Wife holds great promise on two accounts: as an engaging page-turner, and as an illuminating comment on personal choice in America. But despite a plot rooted in one of the most divisive issues of the heartland, Brundage sows little more than a juicy, cataclysmic story that succeeds only because you can never manage to put it down.

In typical thriller fashion, the opening scene is a kicker. Dr. Michael Knowles, a keen young obstetrician in upstate New York, answers his beeper in the middle of the night. Expecting it to be a mistake, he is surprised to hear they need him at the hospital. Over-worked but wed to his profession, he is forever on watch for another patient (or any woman, but his wife, for that matter) to save. It is what keeps him going. It is what has recently driven him to volunteer at an abortion clinic. It is what leads him to respond to a suspicious page in the middle of the night … but will it be his last?

The Doctor’s Wife is notable for its hook. Most often when abortion is written about, it’s within the boundaries of a few familiar domains: legislative updates, health policy reports, religious propaganda, or newspaper stories about the impact of judicial nominees. It is rare to read a novel concerned with the intersection between two characters who have made life-altering choices: the one by Dr. Knowles to perform abortions, and the other by a religious fanatic to perpetrate violence against him. As it stands, one of the greatest threats to reproductive choice in the United States is the lack of abortion providers. And as the wife of a doctor who trained in environs akin to those where real-life abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian was murdered in 1998, Brundage knows the terrain well.

So it is with this verisimilitude that we race from an assassination attempt into a well-conceived denouement. As it turns out, Dr. Knowles’ troubles are not isolated to attempts on his life. Annie Knowles is growing disillusioned with her creative writing professorship and increasingly bored with being “the doctor’s wife.” She has started spending a lot of time at seedy motels with painter Simon Haas, whose wife, Lydia, is occupied with her own religio-maniacal fits and starts. And when the Knowles begin receiving anonymous threats it is clear that the two couples are more involved than it seemed.

Told from the alternating viewpoints of Michael, Annie, Simon, and Lydia, The Doctor’s Wife is full of characters making desperate choices about how to live their lives. Suspenseful, provocative, and imminently readable, it is a classic page-turner with a captivating thriller plot. So while at times the characters feel like they are flip-flopping between being shadows and caricatures of themselves, it is impossible to leave them for too long without wondering what is going to happen next.

The problem is that the story opts to focus on the least interesting character of the tetrad. As the title tells us clearly, the story is less about Dr. Knowles’ career choice than his wife’s bedroom behavior — and this is where the book goes wrong. Focusing too many words on the adulterous (and comparatively drab) relationship between Annie and Simon, The Doctor’s Wife weakens at the seams as it goes on, venturing too closely to romantic fiction than moral thriller.

Ultimately by turns both fascinating and flimsy, this book is an uneven affair. So if your summer book club favors psychological thrillers that slip on Freud more than they challenge him, be pleased that The Doctor’s Wife is now available in paperback. For the rest of us that savor something denser, keep licking your lips.