People Collide

In the engrossing latest from McElroy (The Atmospherians), a couple’s stagnant marriage is enlivened after the husband wakes up in his wife’s body. When Elizabeth, a writer and academic, receives a teaching fellowship, she and her husband move from the U.S. to Bulgaria. There, she goes to work every day, while Eli, who is also a writer, grows increasingly unhappy (“Marriage had melted our days into one warped single day, like a wax statue burned to a blob,” he muses). Their routine is shaken when Eli realizes one morning that he has somehow come to inhabit Elizabeth’s body and sets out to determine what happened to his own body, and to Elizabeth. A comedy of errors ensues, fueled by the question of whether the couple will reunite and whether Eli will be able to change back, as Eli-as-Elizabeth follows his wife’s trail to Paris. It would be a spoiler to reveal how Eli’s change impacts the marriage, but McElroy deserves credit for an imaginative and no-holds-barred exploration of Eli’s gender and sexuality after the change (during a sex scene in a museum bathroom, Eli remarks on “the voice of my own desire cleansed of all inhibitions”). It’s an impressive twist on the familiar trope of marital ennui. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)