Evelyn Hugo gets around. Unpacking Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Yeap, Ima put some spoilers here.
That Evelyn Hugo sure gets around doesn’t she? I don’t know anybody in my life that had seven husbands, I think three is plenty. No, I’ve never been married though I was ready for it at some point, but how I wish that marriages won’t be as dire and shammy as what Evelyn had to go through. Reid certainly isn’t selling it right. But this book isn’t really an advertisement of marriages, quite the opposite.
The title “Seven Husbands” is ironic. Yes, Evelyn has seven husbands, but she was married eight times. The marriage not implied in the title is the one that matters the most. Evelyn is in love with a woman, Clare St James, who would return her love. But they are living in a man’s man world where studio execs are more powerful than Hitler on a good day, and things are a bit more conservative way back when at the golden age of cinema, when everybody was still talking this weird transatlantic accent that suits the English as well as the American.
The eight marriages of Evelyn Hugo
The viewpoint of the story comes from Monique Grant, a 35 year old biracial junior writer in Vivant magazine, something that I imagine is like Vogue. When an email came from Evelyn Hugo’s publicist for an article, provided Evelyn is interviewed by Monique Grant, Vivant’s chief editor Frankie could not refuse. Evelyn Hugo is well known for her reclusiveness, a deeply private person whose speculations in the tabloid only fed more fodder to her legend, now a woman in her seventies who still maintains all her elegance and constitution.
Evelyn did not want Monique to write just an article however, she wants a tell-all biography of her life. Her first marriage was a good start as any, and it was only a stepping stone to a movie career, a hail Mary move to Los Angeles. Evelyn knew what she had to do: suck some dick, lose her Cuban-ness and use her sexuality like it’s the only thing she’s got (some would argue throughout the book that it’s her only asset). But it pays off in spades as she leaves her first husband and eventually meets her next husband, more on par to her level and ambition: the heartthrob: Don Adler.
Don was abusive, and becomes even more so as his star declines and Evelyn’s ascends. In the course of her life, Evelyn marries a rockstar, her gay producer and best friend, a French director who only loved the idea of her, a financier and a woman. Save for the latter, each of them had either a particular purpose or caprice — Evelyn would only love Clare St James and her daughter.
A possible instant classic, yet I found it grossly underwhelming
Seven Husbands has a reputation now which seeds it to become an eventual modern classic. The critics overall would agree, and the Goodreads rating for the book is astronomically high at 4.43. Even those who criticised the book were quite defensive in saying that it is not a genre that they liked, or that it is still an important book regardless of how they would feel about it. I would go for neither. And while I can see the charm of the book, I really couldn’t say I really liked it. I thought it was a bit shit.
The issue I have in the book are typical issues that plague modern fiction these days: characterisation and prose.
So what’s with the characters? I feel like I’m watching a girlboss woke movie that’s sanctioned by Marvel studio heads, except that there’s no superheroes here. I can’t really connect with the narrator of the story, I found her weak, unpleasant and a bit pathetic. Evelyn Hugo is proud with a few jagged edges, but let’s face it, she’s a bit of a cunt with a loose moral compass. Perhaps this is the draw of her character: that to fulfill her ambitions she had to become the greatest sellout. Her tell all and immediate suicide is just the confirmation of her cowardice.
And though it is a personal preference, as most people seemed to have loved the writing, I really didn’t. The book went by like a breeze. Though digestibility isn’t the best indication of the quality of the prose (for example, I find Maugham easy to read as though he writes like how an 80 year old sushi chef cuts fish), I don’t find anything special about it. There are no sentences that hit me, and for those that others may quote, we can reduce them to inelegant truisms.
The crimson joy tainted with a dash of emerald
In recent years, there has been more openness to diversity whether it be from migrant writers, writers of colour, second-generation writers fromor even white writers. This is a good thing, and the fact that there is a market for it shows us that we are more tolerant, more curious and hopefully more sympathetic. But I don’t feel the authenticity here, except for the showbusiness part, where Reid has first-hand experience.
We cannot talk about Evelyn Hugo without talking about sexuality, and how it is used. To Evelyn Hugo, her sexuality is both her internal and external identity, both starkly different. Though heterosexual sex to her can be pleasurable, as she had with Don Adler, she can only be intimate with Clare. Can we respect the choices that Evelyn made in the course of her life, to have abandoned Clare and later regretting it? Would we have done the same thing knowing that great success is around the corner?
I guess this is the crux of the book: what would you do if you were Evelyn Hugo? Credit where credit is due, Reid asks an important question. Do we sacrifice our identity and culture for the sake of success? By the end, Evelyn’s response was no, it was not worthwhile, as she had more money than Japanese insurance and everybody around her were all dead.
I guess Evelyn Hugo is a forewarning to never lose the crucial parts of our identity and not to sell ourselves out. Yet, we can also make the argument that success comes at a cost, and if that’s your thing, then your identity be damned. Beyond the scope of this book and review, one must ask the depth of one’s roots.
Maybe I’m just tired of all the woke shit around me, and though Seven Husbands is not necessarily woke literature, there is a bit of a that pungency that draws me off. But I don’t know about that, because I love seeing characters of diverse background succeed against all odds — it is still a classic story of heroes and anti-heroes. A recent story that comes to mind (though in a different media) is Blue Eye Samurai in Netflix. Holy shit that show blew me away. Even the latest Castlevania: Nocturne which had a cast of diverse characters. Unfortunately I can’t think of any examples from recent literature that struck this perfect balance.
No, I don’t think the flaws of Seven Husbands is in its message, or even ambition, but in its delivery. But hey, that’s just me. I guess when I’m the only with this opinion, I’m the problem.
