A novel whose explosive opening–”I shot him between the eyes”–unfolds into the penetrating injury of a failed marriage. Ginzburg astounds because she communicates so much without an ounce of sentimentality. It’s an anti-romance that asks when a wife should kill her husband. It’s also, slyly, a novel about being involved with a doctor. The narrator leaves the home of her father, a country doctor, for the big city. Then meets her future husband at a Roman doctor’s house. She is stuck inside the story of being with doctors, inside someone else’s story, until she shoots her way out.