SOURCE: Long, Priscilla. “Literate Obsessions.” Women's Review of Books 19, no. 1 (October 2001): 14-15.

In the following review, Long evaluates Carson's examination of the roles of desire and truth in relationships in The Beauty of the Husband.

Anne Carson's seventh book, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is a poem about an erotic relationship that proceeds from adolescent fixation to post-divorce continuing fixation. Carson is a classical scholar as well as a poet, and her intense and synthesizing erudition, here brought to bear on the subject of desire, is partly what makes her such a thrilling read. She moves easily from Duchamp to Degas to Demeter, the mythical mother who, like the mother here, is dead set against her daughter's disastrous fling with Hades. In The Beauty of the Husband, the mother's opposition to her daughter's crazy boyfriend is futile. At fifteen, the daughter says, “I...