Soap operas may be nearly extinct, but their flair for the dramatic lives on. “Husbands & Lovers,” Beatriz Williams’s new work of historical fiction wrapped in a beach read, begins with a series of significant tragedies: a mushroom poisoning, a cobra bite, a slip-and-fall death from the terraces of Machu Picchu. Then there’s a “paternity incident,” a desperate hunt for a kidney and a pilgrimage to an Irish orphanage — across three generations and four timelines.
“Husbands & Lovers” is less about husbands and more about lovers. In 2022, a single mother named Mallory Dunne must stare down the most monumental of her paramours: Monk Adams, a best friend turned boyfriend from the summer of 2008. During this magical season, the two enjoyed a series of unprotected trysts on Winthrop Island (fictional, but inspired by real-life Fishers Island, we learn in an author’s note) before an abrupt and mysterious breakup. Monk is now a famous singer of indeterminate genre (picture a modern-day troubadour crooning from bar stools). He’s newly relevant to Mallory and her 13-year-old son, Sam, after the boy ingests the aforementioned “death cap mushroom,” suffers renal failure and suddenly requires a new kidney.
Williams then presses pause on all of the above to introduce a more engaging, artfully drawn pair of lovers. In Cairo in 1951, Hannah Ainsworth humors her fusty husband, Alistair — a Brit who “devoted himself to the service of empire” — while wandering the Pyramids with a Swiss-Egyptian hotel manager named Lucien Beck. Hannah catches Lucien “looking not at the Sphinx, but at her,” Williams writes with old Hollywood panache. A quietly fierce heroine, Hannah totes a pistol in her pocketbook; having survived the traumas of World War II in Hungary, she isn’t taking any risks. Now, as she observes the mounting political tension in Egypt, she asks Beck, “Don’t you want this country for yourself?”
Williams might have heightened the stakes between Hannah, her husband and her lover, but Hannah’s stolen moments still smolder. Descriptions of tense postwar Cairo are both commanding and detailed: “the smell of fruit and spice and sunshine and dirt and excrement,” “the rage you felt roiling beneath the skin of everything — buildings, streets, people.”
Back on Winthrop Island, Williams writes more confidently about the beachy, old-money setting (the wood-paneled Wagoneers, the cheekily named houses) than she does about Mallory, Monk or Sam. In flashbacks to that fateful summer, it’s clear why Monk, a WASP with a heart of gold, falls for Mallory, a spunky art student, but it’s less apparent what she sees in him. Apart from a single mention of mortgage-backed securities, the relationship doesn’t feel grounded in 2008. Monk’s earliest fans still ask for autographs and the dialogue reads as old-fashioned, with Mallory repeatedly saying “gosh” and Monk claiming to “just lose my brains” over her. Despite being an ambitious college student, Mallory doesn’t appear to weigh her options when she gets pregnant.
In “Husbands & Lovers,” the tenuous link between past and present is a ruby-encrusted, cobra-shaped bracelet, given to Hannah and later inherited by Mallory from her late mother. “But which mother?” Williams asks.
The presence of the heirloom made me wish for more connective tissue between Hannah’s Cairo affairs and the saga on Winthrop Island; a loose theme around fathers and sons and Mallory’s sister Paige’s DNA journey didn’t quite cut it. But, just as I started to worry that Williams was tying her loose ends in pretty bows, she delivered a conclusion involving Mallory and Hannah’s matrilineal line. It’s a soap-worthy cliffhanger, and one that took me by surprise.