The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

When Mia’s husband leaves her for a bouncy-breasted younger woman, Mia retreats to her childhood hometown in Minnesota. She visits her mother, befriends four elderly woman in a residential home, teaches poetry to pre-teen girls, and starts a sex journal - of her encounters before marriage.

She reflects on her father, courtship, bullying. She gets caught up in the volatile lives of her neighbours. Someone starts sending her anonymous, unsettling emails. A little like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Mia meets echoes of her past, present, and future.

Mia’s husband asks for a pause in their relationship, and Pause is the name Mia gives to his mistress, but this marital pause is also what enables Mia to rediscover and reclaim her individuality - her sense of self excised from the marital unit.

The prose is intellectually playful with digressions and riffs on art and writing, science, and philosophy, gender and identity. For me what was missing was a reason to care for Mia.