Something snaps

Comedy quickly turns to tragedy in Virginia Feito's 2021 novel Mrs. March.

The wife of a best-selling novelist, Mrs. March is shocked when a woman in a pastry shop raves about his latest book, then adds that the main character, a plump and unattractive woman, appears to have been inspired by Mrs. March herself.

Something snaps in Mrs, March, who appears to have been not all that stable to begin with. Without bothering to actually read the novel, she listens to conversations about it and suspects people are talking about her. She steals and destroys copies of the novel. She starts lying  about everything, however unreasonable the lies. She has always been one who puts on airs, but that trait intensifies. When she spots a cockroach in her kitchen, she won't call an exterminator for fear of what people might think.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the town near her husband's hunting cabin, she concludes that he must be the murderer and begins looking for evidence, even to the point of visiting that town and searching for clues in the cabin.

The biggest mystery in Feito's novel is what George March saw in Mrs. March in the first place. And Mrs. March is what she is called throughout the novel, even in flashbacks to when she was a little girl. Her mother, we are told, was "pregnant with Mrs. March." Was she ever truly stable, and what is she capable of now that she is truly insane?