Jessica Anthony’s The Most is pitched as a one-sitting read, the story of a marriage pushed to its brink and a moment of shocking realization triggered by long hours in a pool. But distilling this novel down to just these elements misses its other dimensions, how it captures an anxiety both specific to its time and broadly relatable, how its narrator twists and diverts the story at will, and how in under 150 pages we are presented and taken through an incredibly nuanced conflict.
Kathleen and Virgil are the seemingly all-American couple: married for a number of years, parents of two young boys, and new residents of suburban Delaware. One Sunday morning, Kathleen takes a dip in the apartment complex pool despite the fact that it’s mid-November, and Virgil finds the behavior unusual. He golfs with his work friends, comes home, and finds his children sent to a neighbor and Kathleen still soaking in the pool, laughing off his attempts to get her out. The scene becomes a minor spectacle, and flashbacks in time give us the context we need to understand this stalemate. This couple, never faithful and never honest with one another, has now reached a crisis of understanding. The need for vulnerability is here and now.
This story is indelibly placed in the early 1960s, as Sputnik 2 orbits the earth and the Russian dog Laika is doomed to a painful death. As Laika suffers, so does the young couple and the people around them, failing businessmen and hopeful landlords and grieving fathers. From our twenty-first-century perspective, Kathleen’s plight is more sympathetic than her husband Virgil’s, as her agency as a housewife and mother of two is more limited, and her romantic gestures feel like desperate pleas for companionship. But even Virgil, with his blase attitude and inability to find purpose in his own life thanks to a traumatic childhood, is understandable from beginning to end. Neither member of the marriage is blameless, but neither is cut off from relatability. Jessica Anthony renders the pathos of older domestic dramas such as Revolutionary Road, but with an admirable economy of words and a creative omniscient narrator.
In a story that could easily be seen as one-sided, Anthony chooses to give us more than two sides. Through her use of a relatively removed third-person narrator, we see not only Kathleen and Virgil’s pasts and present, but also their futures, such as the result of a hidden third pregnancy. We delve into the minds of Cosmo the landlord and even Laika as she orbits the earth. Even in passages devoted to the marriage, there are subtle instances of judgment that slant the reader’s perspective. For instance, “he gave her an opal engagement ring over a diamond of baklava,” juxtaposing reality with expectation so we see this marriage as the false pretense it is. Similarly, as Kathleen succumbs to the advances of her former tennis coach Billy Blasko, her lack of agency is emphasized to almost laughable proportions, as if only reacting rather than acting excuses her from culpability. The narrator is not fooled, and neither is the reader. This technique elevates The Most from a simple marriage story to a portrait of an era, a minute event firmly entrenched in a larger world.
FICTION
The Most
By Jessica Anthony
Little Brown and Company
Published July 30, 2024
