Alternating between the perspectives of Jodi and Todd, The Silent Wife dramatizes the theme of tension between perception and reality. The detached, third-person narration never explicitly articulates the ways that each character engages in pretense, delusion, and other forms of magical thinking, but the juxtaposition of their individual perceptions quickly establishes their limitations. At the same time, reality in the novel is perpetually in flux. Only a handful of events—Todd moving in with Natasha, the eviction notice, Todd’s murder—appear to be definitive, and even these are subject to revision, as when Jodi resolves that even Todd and Natasha’s baby would not necessarily be an impediment to Todd and Jodi’s renewed relationship.

The tension between perception and reality also functions as a basic premise of the upper-middle class urban life that Jodi and Todd have built, underlying their public appearance as a stable, long-married couple. Todd’s infidelity is a reality that Jodi avoids, a carefully constructed façade that rests on routine and denial. She explains: “It simply doesn’t matter that time and time again he gives the game away, because he knows and she knows that he’s a cheater, and he knows that she knows, but the point is that the pretense, the all-important pretense must be maintained, the

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