How to Kill your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette

“All husbands think they’re gods. If only their wives weren’t atheists.”

I wanted to love this novel. Kathy Lette is a brilliant comedian and How to Kill your Husband came highly recommended by a friend. Plus, with a title like this one, how could I possibly not read it? (if only to leave it around to freak out the OH). Alas, I did not love How to Kill your Husband, but without wanting to damn it with faint praise, I’d say it was quite good in places. So, good bits first: the narrative moves quickly, there are lots of plot twists and turns, and there is some fabulously funny dialogue. How to Kill your Husband begins as a relentless barrage of amusing quips, but in between the jokebook-style one-liners (many of which I had literally read in my old jokebook), the tension builds and it becomes something of a page-turner: I finished it in a day.

Cassie O’Carroll is a primary school teacher, mother of two and wife to boring Rory, a chronically lazy veterinarian. Cassie has lost her orgasm, her pizazz and, seemingly, her ability to stick up for herself. She dreads ‘the Hand’ crawling towards her… that would be Rory’s hand, rather than an Addams Family Thing type creature. Luckily, Cassie has her two best friends to confide in. The friends in question are Hannah Wolfe, a wealthy gallery owner, who speaks three languages in a ‘rapid-fire South African Jewish accent,’ and Jasmine Jardine, femme fatale and glamorous wife to ‘Studz’, a celebrity philanthropist doctor with a mega-watt smile and a wandering eye. You could say these aren’t the sort of characters I’m familiar with in my every day existence, because in the world of How to Kill your Husband, marrying a vet is akin to slumming it.

Plot-wise it’s the story of these three forty-something friends finding that their marriages are not what they’d signed up for. At the start of the novel Jasmine is in prison, charged with killing her husband and Cassie is called upon to give Jasmine’s solicitor an account of the preceding year. So Cassie narrates, and we watch as the main characters endure betrayal after betrayal. Meanwhile the husbands run the gauntlet of other women, including some horrible clichés of home-wreckers. There are also some underdeveloped subplots concerning the main characters’ children and careers. At times I completely forgot about the existence of Cassie’s son and daughter, so rarely do you see her interacting with them.

Cassie can be incredibly frustrating in that she has this amazing wit, these sarcastic Kathy Lette one-liners up her sleeve, and yet she is so cowed with a sense of inadequacy that she never utters them. Halfway through I was exhausted with Cassie as the ever-suffering martyr and wondered if the book would have been more enjoyable had it been titled How To Kill Your Annoying Passive Aggressive Wife.

How to Kill Your Husband sits somewhere between chicklit and a comedy novel. The characterisation isn’t what you might call a profound insight into human nature, but I don’t think it intends to be. James Purdon puts it perhaps a tad harshly in his Guardian review when he says:

There are no characters in this book, only vehicles for Lette’s inexhaustible supply of single entendres.) How to Kill Your Husband should be taken on its own terms: the cringeworthy punnery is supposed to be part of the fun.

To my mind it was mostly a playful look at some clichés – with the exception of the rival female characters, where the tone was not quite so playful. These women were totally demonised by the narrative. There was a sense of the main characters and perhaps the reader being led to sneer at certain kinds of supposedly less sophisticated and less accomplished women. I found myself wondering about that.

There was also an issue of women and weight that I found a bit troubling. Cassie says:

The day I got married I weighed seven and a half stone. A few years later I was in Top Shop, hyperventilating as I tried to pull a pair of size 10 jeans up over my hips. I looked in the mirror and there was my mother – all small boobs and big bum. When did I pass nine stone?

I thought this sort of body hatred was a bit depressing and I was slightly concerned about the message it was sending. However, these are just my personal reactions and I’m sure others will feel quite differently.

The prose can be quite lovely:

There is a despondent grandeur to London’s architecture, reminiscent of an old lady wearing a fur coat she’s had since her thirties. I veered past the terraced houses of Primrose Hill and on into Regents Park. Trees thrashed in the wind. Towards Euston, the streets disintegrated into flimsy tower blocks which had spread like an architectural carcinoma after the Blitz.

My loudest chuckle (possibly thanks to Bookfox, Rosy) came when I read:

I was shocked that such a thought could occur to me. There was no history of insanity in my family, except that my father did give up a job as a musician to become an accountant.

The novel’s ending is symbolic and ironic, and sees the husbands suitably punished, but only after the women have broken ethical codes and laws to get even. So how to kill your husband? I couldn’t possibly reveal all, but let’s just say one possible method of despatching a husband might involve a blood-soaked female hygiene product…

For the Bookbag’s review of HTKYH, click here.
Simon and Schuster UK. 326 pages. £10.99 ISBN 0-7432-4807-4.