Delicate Condition

Dexter Harding is a successful New York businessman who marries Anna after the failure of his first marriage to a woman named Adeline. Dex is, superficially, very invested in Anna’s IVF journey and her resulting pregnancy; he shows up to all of her treatments, keeps track of her medications, and even makes food for Anna so she can more easily follow her doctor’s dietary suggestions. Even from the outset, though, Dex is an emotionally distant partner who routinely ignores Anna’s feelings of pain and confusion. He is often absent from the house, spends a great deal of time on the phone without telling Anna who he’s speaking to, and refuses to tell Anna much at all about his past experiences with Adeline.

Dex is fairly static character. He becomes nervous about—and exasperated by—Anna’s spiraling physical condition, but he otherwise doesn’t change his outlook or emotional state over the course of the novel. Dex shows occasional moments of vulnerability, such as when he confesses to Anna that he would be “harmed” if she got an ultrasound after her miscarriage, but these instances of emotional vulnerability typically come at Anna’s expense as Dex prioritizes his desires over hers. As Anna begins to see Dex more clearly, which includes stumbling across his affair, she learns that Dex left Adeline after the woman refused to conceive only to start cheating on Anna when she began struggling to conceive. Dex represents a patriarchal society that values women only for their reproductive capacity. Dex is eventually killed after Anna bites off his finger while he’s driving her to the hospital; even in his final moments, he never truly understands his wife’s emotions or sees her as more than a vessel for his offspring.

Siobhan Walsh is Anna’s best friend and a famous actress in her own right. Siobhan is, in Anna’s estimation, a liberated and fully self-realized person: She is “[c]ompletely, effortlessly herself, the kind of woman who knew where to find the best secret bars in Paris, who perfumeries named signature scents after, who had a lover on every continent” (40-41). Siobhan shares the closest, most tender emotional intimacy with Anna and is a key figure in the theme of The Necessity and Limits of Female Friendship. During their conversation while Anna is in the restaurant’s bathroom, Siobhan is able to ease Anna’s anxieties through humor without dismissing them; she is a counterpoint to Dex in that she allows Anna to open up and express herself however she needs to.

Siobhan has a cancer relapse, and it is this relapse that—unbeknownst to Anna—sets into motion the horrific events of the second half of the novel. It’s revealed at the end of the novel that Siobhan, part of a coven of fertility witches, has performed a spell to revive Anna’s miscarried fetus and to prepare that fetus to become a vessel in which Siobhan herself will be reincarnated. This revelation entirely shifts Anna’s understanding of who Siobhan is and what she wants. Anna suffers brutally because of Siobhan’s spell and because the coven was unable to tell her what was happening. When the truth emerges, Anna asks Siobhan if their friendship was ever genuine or if Siobhan befriended her only to use her for her body. Siobhan’s response—that Anna’s “friendship has meant more to me” (396) than Anna could know—is brief. Yet Anna interprets the response, along with the fact that Siobhan performed the spell while she was dying, as an act of good faith and a sign that Siobhan never intended to use her. Siobhan’s failures to obtain Anna’s explicit consent at any stage of this process, though, raise questions about the ethics of her actions. The final interlude shows that Siobhan has been reincarnated as Anna’s child. This ending offers no resolution to the question of the morality of Siobhan’s actions, but it does show that Anna and Siobhan have forged an even closer bond than they had before.