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One person who is not laughing is Brown’s protagonist, Alice Hale, the 21st-century newlywed who has recently left a once-promising career in public relations and moved from Manhattan to a sleepy New York suburb. In the basement of her new house is a box left by the previous owner that’s filled with magazines from the 1950s plus a dusty, circa-1930s copy of “Cookbook for the Modern Housewife.” The collection offers a trove of anachronistic recipes and rules, but mostly, the box is a portal to another world, one that makes Alice feel a little less lonely in her new directionless life. At the other end of the portal is Nellie Murdoch, a Betty Draper type whose life is spent tending to her spectacular garden, baking cakes for Tupperware parties and keeping up appearances while living with her philandering, physically abusive husband.
Right from the beginning, as their broker gives Alice and her husband, Nate, a tour of the 1940s house in fictional Greenville, Alice feels uneasy. Everything it stands for makes her feel nauseous. All she wants is to be back in her cramped apartment eating takeout. Nate has a different reaction altogether. The house is the logical next step in the narrative he’s already written for them: wedding, apartment, suburbs, family. He wins, yes, because, like the other men who populate this book, he walks through the world “expecting life would give him whatever he wanted simply because he asked for it.” But also because he’s the one bankrolling their life now, which sets up a new, prickly dynamic for Alice, making her feel like less of a partner.
Once they move in, this dynamic infuses every part of their marriage, right down to the night she makes a mess of the kitchen and Nate doesn’t lift a finger to help, something that never would’ve happened in their old life when they were both working, i.e. equal partners. Before she knows it, the resentment begins to fester and Alice starts taking her lead from 1950s Nellie — whose first lie to her husband “coincided with the first time she discovered another woman’s lipstick stain on his shirt collar” — misleading Nate about everything from birth control to the humiliating career scandal that drove Alice to leave her job.
Though many of the darker scenarios in Brown’s novel don’t elicit the heavy emotions they’re meant to, and the 1950s references can feel gratuitous more than textured (housewives cooking while listening to “Hound Dog”; doctors casually prescribing Thalidomide and recommending cigarettes to pregnant women), it’s easy to keep turning the pages as we toggle back and forth between Alice and Nellie, who — breaking news — has a far more complicated life than a stack of Ladies’ Home Journals would lead Alice to believe.
When a neighbor hands Alice a bundle of unsent letters written by Nellie to Nellie’s mother, the mystery begins in earnest, and it turns out Nellie has a lot more to teach Alice about being a wife and a woman than how to bake a good batch of cookies. The most important? Take those trappings you resent so much — cooking, gardening, bearing children — embrace them, then wield them like weapons.
