Wisely, author Elizabeth Dewberry sets the story of Ellen Baxter, an Atlanta housewife, on the periphery of a physics conference in Paris. Ellen's husband, Nobel laureate Lawrence Baxter, expects her to fulfill her role as "His Lovely Wife" Ð a role in which she is attractive, present, and effectively silent. When Ellen arrives in Paris, and her car pulls up to her hotel, she is briefly mistaken for Princess Diana, and for a moment she stands beneath the flash of countless photographers. She sees that "the photographers were completely ignoring" her husband, and thinks, "This is crazy. He's the Nobel laureate. If they had any idea who either of us was, they'd be photographing him." But in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death, which occurs while the Baxters are in Paris, Ellen is stirred to ruminations about her own role as a "trophy wife." She begins to question her marriage, her identity, and her vision of the afterlife, in the context of Lawrence's scholarship. Where Lawrence reduces objects to the molecular level, Ellen reads the world experientially, through emotion; where Lawrence busies himself with the complexities of his contemporaries' theories, Ellen is in conversation with the spirit of Diana herself.

Diana's voice is a steady presence in His Lovely Wife Ð long, italicized meditations, in which her thoughts about love and identity serve to illuminate Ellen's own uncertainties. While it is an interesting and innovative risk that Dewberry takes, it is not the strongest element of the story. Often, this spirit-voice delivers maxims and platitudes that are not as specific as Ellen's personal conflicts: she is intensely attracted to Max Kafka, a photographer, whom she met upon her arrival. She is lonely in her marriage, feels unappreciated by her stepson, and has never been able to get pregnant. She is tormented by memories of her father's death by car accident, and her mother's beauty queen fantasies.

Ellen's mother, "a former Miss Alabama with a singing ventriloquist act," is the most sharply drawn and memorable person in Ellen's life. Among many of Ellen's struggles, she is trying to write a children's book, with a protagonist whose life is similar to her own childhood. This story reveals a realm of grotesque and fascinating obsession with beauty pageants and finding a husband. Ellen's mother treats her ventriloquist's doll like a second daughter Ð Ellen remembers watching her mother "sitting on the edge of the bed, having a conversation with Katie." The implications here are brilliant and complex. Ellen's mother focuses her attention on an object of which she has utter control, a pseudo-daughter whose very words must come from her mouth; but when she turns for a confidant, she resorts to a hollow, soulless being, rather than speaking to her willful, breathing child.

Haunted by Diana's voice, and the voice of her mother, Ellen is confronted with a woman who seems, at first, to be her exact opposite. Lawrence's friend and colleague, Eric, is about to propose to Mart, a German physicist with painfully sharp wit and a condescending air. Ellen recoils at first, but when they see each other on a street in Paris, they politely join each other. Mart confesses, over a wine-infused lunch, that "Eric wants to get married," with a "glum expression." When Ellen suggests that she will "have smart children," Mart replies, "Even very smart children, I find boring." Although there is a touch of the strong-woman prototype in Mart, she serves to remind Ellen that even a woman who is not a housewife, a woman whose mind Lawrence clearly admires, is not salvaged from the possibility of becoming the silent half of a marriage.

Dewberry plunges through a series of resolutions in His Lovely Wife Ð Ellen follows her impulse to call Max Kafka, and sleeps with him in his darkroom; Mart agrees to marry Eric; Diana's spirit eventually extracts itself from Ellen's mind. But Ellen is left, at the end of the novel, with her own dissatisfactory marriage, and it is unclear whether or not she will continue to live with Lawrence, or whether she will try to forge a new life. It is a strength of the story that Ellen is sitting in her hotel room when the reader leaves her; just as Lawrence has not proved all his theories, it would not be right, in the spirit of this story, to leave the world without an abundance of the unknown.