Venus Envy

Venus Envy is Rita Mae Brown’s 1993 novel and one of the great comic premises in late-twentieth-century American fiction. Mary Frazier Armstrong, a successful Charlottesville gallery owner with a tight-laced upper-middle-class life, is told she has weeks to live and uses the time to write blunt, true, occasionally apocalyptic letters to her mother, her brother, her best friend, her ex-girlfriend, her clients, and the man who is in love with her. Then the diagnosis turns out to be wrong. The novel is the next year of her life.

Brown is in her sharp-comedy register here, closer to Six of One than to Rubyfruit Jungle. The Virginia social fabric (hunt-country money, gallery politics, Episcopal funerals) gets dissected without losing affection, and the supporting cast is unusually deep for a one-premise novel. The letters themselves are the most quoted set pieces, but the real work happens in the back half, when Frazier has to live with what she has said. Brown is funny about humiliation in a way few writers manage. The ending is gentler than the setup promises, and the book is better for it.

Recommended for readers who liked the comic-Virginia register of Brown’s standalones and for anyone looking for books like Venus Envy in the "if I knew I was dying" comic-revelation tradition (Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe, Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me are useful cousins). Solid four stars, and one of Brown’s most reread novels for a reason.