he’d come to confuse realism with reality. It was her opinion that he was looking to life for the satisfactions provided by novels: the possibility of redemption, answers and patterns, motive and cause. Women were mocked for Bovarysme, but in her experience it was men who were swayed by well-worn narrative tropes. Life was random and cruel, she said, and she’d lost patience with his unwillingness to face that fact.
