IIn her latest novel, The Exhibitionist, Charlotte Mendelson explores with glorious delight the torments of marriage to a monster. Ray Hanrahan, a former YBA and full-time egomaniac, is abusive, manipulative and misogynistic, a mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. When his family gathers for his first exhibition in over a decade, his more talented wife Lucia must decide whether to sabotage her own success as a sculptor to save their marriage. It’s a brilliant and blackly humorous study of narcissistic dysfunction, driven by the dual desire to see Lucia set free as a woman and artist, and to see the unspeakable Ray get what is his due. With sharp eyes, sharp tongue and blistering precision, it crackles with feminine fire and fury.

That anger is cranked up to 11 in “Wife,” the destruction of another toxic marriage, this time between two women. Zoe and Penny have been together for 18 years and have two teenage daughters, Rose, Penny’s biological, and Matty, Zoe’s biological, but after years of emotional abuse, Zoe is on the verge of a breakdown. Over the course of a single harrowing day, she and Matty must move out of the family home with or without Rose, a conflict that tears her in two. She must also endure a mediation session with Penny, the girls’ biological father, Robin, and Robin’s sister (and Penny’s ex) Justine, all of whom blame Zoe for absolutely everything that has gone wrong.

Woven into these dies horribilis is the story of their life together. Zoe, from whose perspective the novel is told, is one of those women for whom Mendelson has long been a patron saint: intelligent, overeager and desperate to please, a socially awkward graduate student who has to make do with microwave meals for one until she meets Penny, a professor ten years her senior. Penny is everything Zoe is not – an arrogant, self-confident glamour chick in high heels and lipstick who kisses Zoe extravagantly in public and calls her a prudish for her self-assurance. The situation is complicated, Penny lives with another woman, but Zoe is powerless to help herself. She falls head over heels in love, thrown off balance by an all-consuming desire.

Marriages “fascinate the curious,” Mendelson wrote in 2022. “There are few things more exciting than a truly molecular look at how a relationship works or fails: the public flirtations, the discreet cruelties.” In Zoe and Penny’s marriage, however, there is little sign of discretion. Penny is a second Ray Hanrahan, mindlessly cruel and monstrously needy. Like Ray, she demands endless adoration while blithely belittling Zoe at every opportunity. But while Ray was comically monstrous, Penny is simply a monster. She has neither Ray’s early talent nor his demonic demeanor. She gets none of his memorable lines. What Zoe can possibly see in her remains a mystery. Aside from her undeniably excellent hair, she lacks a single quality that could be considered a positive.

In another novel, this might have set the stage for pitch-black humor. Indeed, Mendelson assembles a cast of pretty epic cruelty: Penny may be their queen, but Penny’s friends are also relentlessly awful. Robin is so fixated on “his” nights as a father that he hires lawyers to enforce them when the girls are sick. The mediators they go to for counseling are incompetent or lacking in character or both, taking even Penny’s most untenable lies at face value. But while The Exhibitionist took a similar list of ingredients and worked them into a gleeful satire on family and the beatification of (male) artistic genius, Wife is a book that is an open wound.

There are occasional joyous flashes of Mendelson’s sharp wit — Matty’s denim jacket has “FUCK THE PATRIARCHS” painted on the back, “as if she were a runaway from an Orthodox seminary” — but mostly it simmers with raw, messy pain. The hapless but ever-honorable Zoe must endure an endless barrage of toxic accusations. Gaslighting, bullying, coercive control — she’s subjected to it all. Desperate to save her marriage and protect her daughters, she fights the same battles over and over; over and over again, her efforts are ridiculed and rejected. If insanity means doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then by any standard, Zoe is mad as a hatter. The cycles of evil repeat. Nothing changes. Zoe suffers terribly. Rose and Matty suffer terribly. Penny locks herself in the bathroom and screams.

“There are unreliable narrators in life, not just in literature,” Zoe observes early in the novel, astonished by how many of her acquaintances accept Penny’s toxic version of events. As Wife progresses, it seems certain that Zoe must turn out to be one too, that something seismic will happen that will split the story open and reveal another, more complicated truth at its core. That something never comes. Instead, the book unfolds like a slow-motion car crash, sometimes compulsive, more often frustratingly bleak, a bitter reminder of the monomania of misery and the smoking wreckage of a failed love.