His Lovely Wife

Beautiful Ellen Baxter is tagging along with her Nobel laureate husband, Lawrence, to a physics conference in Paris when, in a matter of hours, she's mistaken for Princess Diana and then possessed by Diana's just-departed spirit. Ellen has felt unaccomplished, detached, self-deprecating—a "lovely wife" as opposed to a real person. When Diana begins speaking to her from the beyond, Ellen, convinced that they both have lived for and through men, is newly enlivened. The story gains momentum when Ellen decides to pursue a paparazzo she encounters at the site of Diana's accident; her tentative overtures toward Max Kafka intersect with her complex feelings about the princess. When she and Max wind up in bed, Ellen begins to make some sense of her experience with the otherworldly: "It's storming outside, but it feels safe and still and very private here, just Max and Diana and me in this room that's been sealed off from the rest of the world." This perceptive, poignant novel lacks a satisfying conclusion—none of Ellen's conflicts with her past (difficult mother, dead father) or her present (brilliant, remote husband) is resolved—but the channeling of Princess Di lends an interesting new twist to the mid-life wife crisis genre. (Mar.)