
The Loved Ones by Mary-Beth Hughes
Like Jean Rhys, Mary-Beth Hughes gives her reader only the barest of warnings before dropping them headlong into frenzy. Her new, 1970s-set novel presents a seductively well-dressed world, and most of the inhabitants are falling apart.
Period sex finally gets its due as dramatic device in Mary-Beth Hughes’s emotionally raw but ultimately elegant novel The Loved Ones. The scene in question opens, as all do in this novel, in medias res, with unhinged rake Nick Devlin in a hotel room with “a pretty girl who seems to have bled all over the bedding.” By the time this passage arrives, near the middle of the book, the dissembling of the Devlin family has already been established: perpetually moving between the East Coast of the United States and England, each member copes with repressed pain through forms of self-destruction. But