Raw Silk
Janet Burroway’s critically acclaimed novel, which the New Yorker hailed as “enormously enjoyable” and Newsweek called “a novel of rare and lustrous quality,” is the story of a woman whose unraveling marriage sends her on a personal odyssey halfway around the world to Japan.
Virginia Marbalestier has come a long way from the California trailer park where she grew up. Now a designer at the textile firm where her husband is the number-two executive, as the mother of a young daughter and the mistress of an English Tudor manor, she has it all. But her husband, Oliver, is becoming increasingly elitist and controlling, resentful of her friendships, and rough in bed. The arrival of a new employee, a distressed young woman in whom Virginia finds the missing threads of her own identity, and the firm’s possible merger with a Japanese competitor heighten the tensions between Virginia and Oliver, and impel Virginia to set off on a foreign adventure that will change her life forever.
Praise
What sets Raw Silk apart is Janet Burroway’s superb stylistic gifts. . . . She combines wit, intelligence and a coolly detached sense of nuance to heighten her prose. . . . A moving account of the alienation of two people and the disjunction of a marriage.
The New York Times
She writes likes a robust angel.
The Guardian, London
Excerpt
This morning I abandoned my only child. She is, at six, a laser-beam blue-eyed anarchist with long bones that even now promise an out-at-elbows adolescence like my own. She also has long feet, which were, when I last saw them, dressed in new wet-look leather and engaged in barking the shins of a certain Miss Meridene of St. Margaret’s Boarding School for Girls. “Don’t leave me!” Jill screamed. But I smiled at Miss Meridene, and I left her. To four Gothic arches and a life of jodhpurs and rice pudding.
I meant it for total submissions (but mine, not Jill’s; not Jill’s!). The reason for it, which has nothing to do with the “reasons” Oliver and I have bandied and bounced and flung at each other like crockery these eight months, is good and sufficient. It’s so odd that the common tulip tree should be made up of nodes and epidermis, xylem and phloem and matrices; it’s only a way among many of looking at a tree, but it can’t fail to make a tree more strange and precious. I’ve been looking at my marriage like that, and waiting for, even looking forward to, the moment when I’d leave Jill at St. Margaret’s. And then I spoiled it, nearly changed my mind, and left her with a clich. It’s a habit of mine.