So, You've Judged a Book By its Cover. My Review of Waiting for Ted.

Waiting for Ted (Marieke Bigg) has a cover that reaches out and grabs you by the throat. A 1950s, pie-holding Stepford Wife with two giant red holes where her eyes should be, like a domesticated version of The Fly. You know at once that whatever it's about, it's going to be messed up.

I had some reservations because it's a literary novel. I don't read much in the way of (contemporary) literary fiction. Having never studied literature at anything beyond a high-school level, it usually leaves me feeling stupid and like a faker. I'm the person at the posh-people party who doesn't know which forks to use and who doesn't know how to ski. I almost didn't write this review, because I was quite sure that I'd make some extremely obvious blunder and reveal how much I don't understand.

Still, this feeling of living a lie gives me something in common with the characters. Waiting for Ted focuses on Rose. She's an upper-class woman ('shooting on the estate' upper class) who is in a relationship with Ted, a working-class estate agent. The focus of her every waking hour is Instagram, and her desire to be a 'Tradwife' interior/decor influencer. She's moderately successful, but at twenty-thousand followers she's hardly a big name, and a long way from recouping the two-hundred grand she has thrown at this dream. Ted - sexist and all too pleased at having 'bagged' a posh girl - is irritated by her spending. Things eventually come to a head over her purchase an expensive chaise lounge. 

The chaise longue is the perfect peice of furniture, not just for her living-room aesthetic but to be the centrepeice of this fight and it's many layers of sexism and classism. He sees it as a pointless luxury - girly, expensive and entirely useless. Her attitude to Ted's working-class family is evident when she calls it 'a seat' rather than burdening them with the French. As Ted and his mother have an upsetting conversation about his mother's poverty while sitting on it, Rose can only think at what a charming, almost Dickensian tableu the scene makes. Later, when Ted does relax on the chaise lounge, he stains it and she all but destroys the chair attempting to get the mark out.

The book takes place during a single evening. At the advice of her neighbour Rose, convinced she needs to save her relationship, beautifies herself and waits for Ted. She is posed, naked on the chaise longue in a 'draw me like one of your French girls' way (an apt reference, placing her as the Rose to Ted's Jack.) As the evening goes on and Ted never arrives, we meander through the events that have led her here.  

Rose isn't a prisoner in any way. She's priveleged, and though her relationship with her parents is tense, it's never broken. She's spending her own money and - for all her Tradwife posing - she isn't actually married to Ted. They have no children. She notes herself that any break could be done cleanly and easily; this is an obsession of her own making. 

Ted does some horrible things during the course of the novel, but he isn't (at the start) worse than anyone else trapped in an unhappy relationship. He's moody and distant - certainly a sexist manchild - but he isn't forcing this domestic life on Rose - she's the one getting off on it. As much as he enjoys the cooked meals and feeling like the big provider when he comes home, he seems tired of the performance and keen for her to do something, anything else.  

So we march onwards, towards the point that Schroedinger's Ted does or does not come home. And I'd love to say my fears were unfounded and that it was a meaningful experience. 

But I didn't get it. 

I was expecting a twist, but the one we were offered didn't fit with the tone of the book. It felt like the end of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but as strange as that ending is, it feels earned. You realise, as it happens, that every page of the book has been leading the characters there. Here... it's like someone throwing a surprise party only for you to point out that it isn't your birthday. My overall emotion wasn't sorrow, or satisfaction, just... that's it?

We don't get answers to any questions that were raised. So far, so literary. We bounce back and forth through Rose's past, but Instagram is permanent. We know that Rose is nearing forty, but she and her friend are obsessing over Instagram in their teens. Her neighbour (whose very house seems to exist out of time) references her husband being in the war, but clearly isn't old enough. Is this set in a future where Insta never falls and yet home-furnishing trends stay more-or-less the same?

I'm not totally stupid. I get the metaphor that the author is going for, but none of the threads come together. Rose has spent the entire book leaping from one easily hash-tagged answer to another, and so her sense of certainity doesn't feel permament, or earned. She (and the story) just give up.