Jessica Anthony’s latest novel, The Most, is a brief but explosive narrative that takes place over just a day in the life of a 1960’s housewife, but manages to explicate a lifetime of anxiety and angst. Kathleen Lovelace, a former college tennis champion at the University of Delaware, finds herself in a Delaware apartment building with her handsome college sweetheart, Virgil, and their two young children. Kathleen has everything she’s supposed to want: a beautiful family, a handsome husband, and a home in the suburbs. But one November morning, when her husband leaves to golf with some coworkers, she gets in the pool of her apartment complex and refuses to come out.
Over the course of the hours in the pool the reader comes to realize that the veneer of Kathleen and Virgil’s marriage is concealing a great deal of anxiety and mistrust. The couple is in a stalemate, they’ve built their marriage on a foundation of mistrust—extramarital affairs, concealed traumas, etc. Anthony gives us a peek into the mind of both Virgil and Kathleen, each of whom are hiding something from each other, and harbor disappointments about what they have given up to stay in their marriage. The novel features flashbacks into their college years, their childhoods which featured a variety of traumas, and the times they’ve stepped outside their marriage both literally and emotionally.
The particular charm of the novel is Anthony’s ability to bend and stretch time, a gift she shares with the titans of short storytelling in which a single moment or day can give the reader all the details they need to understand a character’s entire life. In an essay for Lit Hub, Anthony remarks “I started to see scenes differently, not as a structural apparatus, but as a magical contradiction of time…When I wrote The Most, I gave myself one working day. Eight hours. We know how much we can get done in a day according to our clocks. So it can go in story.” The fear that Kathleen’s single day in the pool strikes in her husband is mesmerizing, as Anthony proves just how a fractured marriage can travel to its breaking point in the course of just a day.
The novel is also a brilliant exploration of the expectations for women in the early 60s, as Kathleen ruminates on her tennis career and what she gave up to be a wife instead of an athlete. She ruminates on the women she beat, who have become renowned athletes and traveled the world without the burdens of childcare or a husband. Both Virgil and Kathleen contemplate what it would look like to explode their lives and abandon their family. The tension between the two of them as they both refuse to reveal the resentment that they have towards each other absolutely crackles, as each of them takes steps forward and backwards, reaching out for each other and then pulling back. Anthony has penned a clever novella that takes all the best elements of strong short story writing to their Platonic ideals.