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Will Moreland heads to his twenty-fifth college reunion with a pretty confident sense of his life. He's a successful psychoanalyst, he has a perfect daughter and a wonderful wife whom he loves deeply. On the surface, he has it all together. Despite all this apparent perfection, though, Will's façade starts to crumble when his Cornell classmates incessantly ask questions about Will's identical twin brother Mitch, a long-distance swimmer who has multi-million dollar endorsement deals and whose face graces the cover of Sports Illustrated. Will and Mitch have been estranged for years, ever since Mitch disappeared after offering the best man's toast at Will's marriage to his wife Carole.
Out of sorts about everyone's interest in Mitch, who's not even at the reunion, Will has a tense and confrontational conversation with Elizabeth, an old college girlfriend. Will reveals that his young son died in a boating accident three years before. He then confronts Elizabeth, whom he believes may have been pregnant with his child when they graduated from college. He demands to receive a strand of the young woman's hair in order to run a paternity test. Elizabeth accuses Will of being ridiculous, of using this hypothetical daughter to reclaim his dead son.
Back in Brooklyn with his family, Will finds himself growing increasingly anxious and distracted. He feels that his sex life with his wife Carole lacks intimacy, and he resents Carole's seeming ability to control her own emotions by practicing yoga. At his therapy sessions, Will begins to fantasize about his female patients and confesses his obsessions to his own psychoanalyst and to his father, who has recently begun a new career and an affair of his own. When a strangely alluring young woman with her own sexual agenda begins seeing Will for therapy, Will finds his marriage, his career, and his own sense of his personal and sexual history falling apart.
Kathryn Harrison's previous works have been filled with the obsessions and betrayals of deeply complex characters, as well as with themes of sexual transgression. Likewise, ENVY is both powerfully erotic and, at times, deeply disturbing, as it deals with betrayal, rape and incest (a theme explored in many of Harrison's works, including her memoir THE KISS). Her writing is by turns lyrical and hilarious, and Harrison writes about sex with a frank rawness that will shock some readers and leave others marveling at the skillfulness with which she writes about taboo topics.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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