The Gallery of Vanishing Husbands

What a wonderful novel by Natasha Solomons!  This is a story of about love and betrayal.  It is also more deeply a story of about inner strength, self confidence and how other people perceive you.
Solomons uses the medium of painting to show how we can see beyond the person's exterior personification to their inner being.

Juliet Montague stands out in her community because she is a young married woman with two children whose husband has deserted her.  In a religious Jewish community a person in this position is called an aguna, not married and not divorced. " The elderly Rabbi Shlonsky cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since he entered the house.  'In Jewish law only men can divorce women. Until your husband returns or dies or divorces you, then you are stuck.  You are married and not married."

She is in limbo because a woman must have a legal paper signed by the husband releasing her from her marriage, but Juliet's husband has run off with the family money and a portrait painted of Juliet when she was a child.

The loss of this portrait becomes like an inability for people to see Juliet.  She feels like she is invisible to the people who surround her.  Without a husband she does not fit into the community she grew up in and and is raising her children in.  She becomes rebellious and starts going against the accepted practices of her extended family and friends.  Her parents are embarrassed by her behavior, but she begins to find happiness and recognition in the art world.

Juliet is celebrating her thirtieth birthday and on an outing to buy a new refrigerator she meets a young artist at a sidewalk show.  She decides that she wants to have a new portrait painted.  "After the business with George, the rabbis decided that she must become a living widow.  He was the one who had vanished but to her dismay she found it was she who had been quietly disappearing  piece by piece.  At that moment, on her thirtieth birthday, she decided that she wanted something more than fridges, more even than paintings of girls reading in the sunlight,  Juliet Montague want to be seen."

This decision reshapes her life and changes the direction her children's lives will take.  Each of her children, a daughter, Frieda and her young son, Leonard.  George, the vanished father,  is the always on the periphery of their lives but the characters int his story make their own decisions right or wrong and learn how to live with their choices.  We are introduced to the art world of portrait painters who, Solomon says, if they are really good can see past a person's exterior and see into their soul.

Reading this novel made me really think about how other people perceive me and what the message is tat I am trying to portray when I dress and act a certain way.  Am I putting out my true self?  Do people see me the way I see myself?  What a terrific story!