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What if 'Gone Girl' moved to Zurich...?
Hausfrau, a novel about a bored ex-pat's wife who seeks illicit affairs in Switzerland's banking belt, has got locals all steamed up - and is set to be the big beach-read of the summer
There are worse places to be exiled than Switzerland. The tax arrangements are congenial, the air is crisp, the strudel and skiing are world-class, and the trains, famously, run on time. But if you were to read a new novel set in the Zurich suburbs, you might form a rather different view of the country.
The Switzerland of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau is a place of stultifying boredom. The banker bourgeoisie have nothing to talk about but mergers and American football and their ex-pat wives have nothing to do but take toy-boy lovers.
Hausfrau offers a coolly compelling portrait of an American adulteress who becomes addicted to infidelity. Bored by her decent, dull, Swiss banker husband, Anna takes a lover, then a second, then a third… Her encounters are described in graphic terms. One reviewer has described the book as “Madame Bovary meets 50 Shades of Grey”.
But while the sex scenes in 50 Shades make you roll your eyes, those in Hausfrau are written with a brutal. breathless urgency. No one’s inner-goddess dances the merengue in this book. To the steaminess of EL James’s erotic classic, it adds the marital dysfunction of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the commuter neuroses of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. There won’t be a sun lounger or beach bag without it this summer.
Unless, of course, you are holidaying in Switzerland, where you might have to throw away the dustjacket or read covertly on a Kindle.
The landlocked country comes out of the book as a soulless, regimented place, insular and dominated by vast, chilly supermarkets and shopping malls. Any high-rollers planning to relocated to Switzerland should the general election herald in a Miliband government that brings in a mansion tax might think twice after reading Hausfrau.
For the book, Essbaum, from Texas, drew on her own experience as an ex-pat living in Dietlikon, near Zurich, with her first husband. Now happily remarried, she was in her mid-thirties when she relocated with her husband, who was studying Jungian psychoanalysis.
“No, I was not terribly happy,” she says. “I was terribly alienated and lonely.”
She found Switzerland to be a conformist place. “You have to do something that fits in. And I don’t ski. It’s cold and you have to balance on those little, tiny sticks. And I don’t like that. I like the part where you drink the brandy afterwards.”
With her former husband busy with work, Essbaum found she had too much time on her hands and not enough to occupy it. “Like Anna, I took German classes and walked around a lot and rode trains and cried. But,” she adds, “I did not have torrid affairs.”
However, she found it almost impossible to make friends. “In Texas you can go to the post office and you can talk to the people behind you and they are your new best friends. Most of Europe isn’t like that. Even Londoners are fairly chatty. But that’s not going to happen in Switzerland.”
She felt trapped and suffered crippling insomnia (as does the fictional Anna) and after two years she left Switzerland – and her husband – to return to the States.
Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau has been described as "Madame Bovary meets 50 Shades of Grey"
Was Essbaum unlucky? Is Anna unlucky? Or is Switzerland not an easy place for British and American ex-pats to feel welcome?
Janet Wertli, 45, has lived in a Zurich commuter-town for the last two-and-a-half years – but to her neighbours she will always be the foreigner. A local farmer even calls her “the English girl”.
Language is, inevitably, a barrier. Originally from Manchester, Janet lives in the Swiss-German part of the country where they speak Schweizerdeutsch, a dialect which, Essbaum notes, “leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape”.
If that wasn’t enough, most TV programmes, including the local news, are in Hochdeutsch (high German), one of Switzerland’s four official languages, but one that many consider to be a foreign tongue and so speak Schweizerdeutsch instead.
“It’s a bit like watching the BBC and then switching to Look North West,” she explains. “Suddenly you’ve gone from hearing the Queen’s English to someone with a really strong Liverpudlian accent. I can speak about three sentences,” she admits.
Janet Wertli feels that she will never be truly integrated while living in Switzerland
Janet is caught between two camps. Her Swiss husband doesn’t want to go to the English pubs in Zurich and meet ex-pats, while his friends have their own Swiss “bubble” into which Janet feels she will never truly be integrated.
She laments that there is no after-work drinks culture. “No one in Switzerland ever says: ‘Let’s all go for a beer.’” At 5.30pm, everyone drives straight home. Her brother-in-law’s attitude is typical, who says: “Why would I want to go out for drinks with the guys from the office? I’ve got two children and a wife.”
However, another Swiss ex-pat, Tracey Keenan, admires her adopted people for their devotion to their families. She says she hates going back to England to find everyone shopping all weekend: “There’s no quality family time.”
On Sundays, Tracey, 52, her husband and their two sons organise trips to natural beauty spots. “We’re not going round B&Q,” she says firmly.
Tracey and her Irish husband have lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years, first in Basel, then Geneva, then Zurich and now in Lausanne, moving for their respective jobs. She runs an organisation, Ready, Steady, Relocate, which helps wives and mothers to settle.
Roger Federer speaking Schweizerdeutsch
She says it can be particularly hard for mothers with babies and toddlers. High-flying husbands may work late hours or travel internationally, while a wife stays at home with the children. If the children are too young for school, then there’s no opportunity to meet other mothers at the playground gates.
Tracey’s sons are now in their teens and she talks fondly of Saturday mornings on the football pitch. “At half-time, you get drinks and even if the kick-off’s at nine, you’re drinking wine at quarter to ten. Of course,” she adds, “we’re in the French part, and they’re all big drinkers.”
She admits, though, that there is a great deal less fun and partying in Switzerland than in England, or in Paris where she spent her early twenties: “The lifestyle is quiet. Good for the liver.”
Too quiet and too good for the liver for some. Jessica Cope, 32, lives in Geneva with her husband and month-old baby. She is American, but lived in London for years before her husband’s job took him to Switzerland. She describes Geneva as “a total ghost town, so dull, so boring, characterless. Everything closes so early. Sundays are tumbleweed – you can’t even buy a loaf of bread.”
She laments how old-fashioned it is. Menus haven’t changed in 20 years and every restaurant table is set with a lace doily.
Wertli would agree: “Swiss food doesn’t seem to have evolved. If you’d been to a local restaurant in the UK 20 years ago, you’d have got chicken, chips and round bullet peas. If you go now, you might get pig’s cheek marinated in red wine. Swiss food is still fondue, raclette, schnitzel and sausages.”
When asked what they miss, ex-pats mention the usual suspects: family, friends, fish’n’chips, curry and, without exception, Marks and Spencer. “Sometimes you just want to buy a pair of socks that doesn’t cost 17 francs,” says Jessica. You can buy luxury watches by the basket (if you have the money), but plain socks and underwear are hard to find.
None of the women I spoke to admitted to having had illicit affairs to distract from homesickness, but then in polite Swiss society that isn’t the sort of thing that one would admit to readily.
View over River Limmat in Switzerland
While Jessica is candid about counting down the weeks until she and her young family move back to London, Janet and Tracey are staying. Tracey insists that, as a Brit, you can integrate, but it takes work. It was two years before she was invited into a Swiss house for an apero – an evening drinks party. (Hausfrau contains an excruciating scene set at an apero party involving Swiss small talk.) “But once you’re in, you’re in,” she says.
Janet, meanwhile, may miss home, but she is annoyed by ex-pats who make no effort. “I meet lots of people who say: ‘I can’t stand this country – I can’t get Oreos in the shops.’ And I think: ‘Well, that’s because it’s not America.’ You have to make the best of it.”
Essbaum suffers occasional pangs of guilt about her book. She tells me that while in New York to give a reading, she found herself in a hotel lift with a man speaking what she recognised as Schweizerdeutsch. “I said to him: ‘Just in case you read my book, I’m sorry if you come off badly in it.’”
She never wanted Hausfrau to be a “hate-letter” to Switzerland; while she may not have felt at home, she did fall in love with the landscape. “It’s gorgeous, that blue horizon. It’s like somebody took a white marker pen and drew children’s little zigzags for the Alps.
“But the truth is – and you see this in the book – even beauty cannot save a person who is lonely and unhappy.”
• Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum (Pan Macmillan, £14.99) is out now. To order your copy for £12.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk