Slow lives of quiet desperation

Marie is married, intelligent, materially comfortable, possibly beautiful and clearly dissatisfied. Her world revolves around her husband, a bored, somewhat disengaged shadow-figure, and, of course, around herself. Their lives are closed; they are each self-absorbed. One might wonder how an author could inspire interest in this pair, but this is the achievement of Madeline Bourdouxhe's tight, intense narrative, Marie (Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK).

Little happens in the book, yet with rare understatement Bour douxhe evokes a sense of lethargic discontent. Although there are no surface tensions, Marie and Jean appear to tread warily around each other, even as they relax on holiday. She fusses over him, he fears encirclement: "It's so hot, my love . . . don't cling to me." As they go through the motions of correct intimacy, sitting side by side on a beach, Marie slips into the interior world she seems to be most happy in. "Her heart was drowning in an infinite tenderness. . . She was going with Jean into a place of warm, intimate shadows; he was pushing her gently towards a table . . ." The fantasy continues. "They were dancing so very close that his happiness must surely equal her own: he too must want their embraces to last for ever."

Even in a setting as unthreatening as a holiday beach, the narrative has a subtle oppressiveness. Marie's responses to her husband are those of one examining a painting. "Jean leans over and stands up, remaining still for a moment, offering his bare chest to the sun. . . she watches him, watches all those gestures that she knows so well and so intimately. Reality tamed . . ." Even while still busily forcing her attentions on her husband, she notices a younger man. For Marie, her discovery of this stranger offers "a reality to guess at, to seize on, to make your own. The realm of the possible; the fascination and excitement of a new world."

Bourdouxhe's exquisite study of bored yearning was first published in Brussels in 1943, but this is the first English translation to appear. It would be too easy, and anyway inaccurate, to pair Bourdouxhe, - born in Belgium in 1906 - with Jean Rhys or Marguerite Duras. Her gift lies in her ability to create intensely psychological emotional ambivalence - the influence of Proust is palpable - while avoiding melodrama and the near self-parody which so often subverts the work of Duras. Her first novel, La Femme de Gilles, was published in Paris in 1937. Simone de Beauvoir's interest in her work led to its being mentioned in The Second Sex.

The quality which makes this novel shiver with unease is the author's discipline and determined understatement. She makes no great plea on her heroine's behalf for the reader's sympathy, yet either does Marie alienate us. There is no hysteria; Marie contains her disappointed awareness of her husband's lack of interest. She is aware of his sexual betrayals, yet the curiously remote though intense affair she conducts with the young student is not an act of revenge. Instead, it helps to assure Marie of her own existence.

Back home in their Paris apartment, Marie and Jean resume their domestic routine. It is the absence of confrontation which make the narrative so intense. Standing in her kitchen, "she touches the utensils . . . wonders at their outlines". When not inhabiting her intense interior half-world of fantasy and speculation, Marie gives Latin lessons at home. When the pupil leaves, she returns to her housework. Her chores cannot distract her completely. "Marie thinks of other young women she knows and smiles at the astonishment they would feel if they could see her now. What did these other women think of Marie; why does she feel herself to be so different, and why has she never succeeded in really becoming their friend?"

Jean's business trips take him away from home, and although it is never explicitly explained, the nature of these trips is obvious. Marie explores Paris in a mental state poised between dream and intense physical response.

Sitting in a sidewalk cafe, she is conscious of being alone, yet the solitude is not presented as loneliness but an opportunity to explore her own sense of self. Again, this state is described with such a level of disciplined detachment that Marie never becomes an object of pity or contempt.

We can observe her without feeling any emotion. Bourdouxhe's intention it the exploration of an individual consciousness. Even the descriptions of Marie's aimless wandering through the city are intended to add to this sense of intellectualised personal experience.

Interestingly, the closest we come to Marie is when she visits her parents and returns to the world of things and smells she knew as a child. "It's not hard to get a mother to talk about the past. As Marie's mother talks and tells stories, she recreates in her heart the little girl that Marie used to be."

An upset in business forces Jean and Marie to return to the small town where his parents live. Much of the tension caused by this upheaval is deflected towards their furniture - which pieces to bring, which to leave, or abandon. The half-life of their relationship is caught with such precision that it seems as if they are standing on a cliff deciding to jump, not merely deciding the fate of inanimate domestic objects.

In the midst of Marie's slow resentment at finding herself living with her in-laws, a crisis, the first and only in the narrative, occurs. Marie's unstable sister makes a suicide attempt which not only engages Marie's attention, but forces her into a determination to live. Choices manifest themselves to Marie throughout a narrative of remarkable psychological density, The story is not a quest, as she appears not to be searching for anything in particular.

The essence of this quiet, elegant, disciplined, non-sentimental study of one woman's consciousness is the way Bourdouxhe, who died in 1996, conveys the sharp, almost physical intensity of thought as experienced by a central character suspended between apathy and restless curiosity.