The Echo Wife

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey, is both wild speculative fiction and realistic relationship tension. Evelyn is a genius scientist working on a cloning project, and her husband has just left her for, well, her clone. A version of Evelyn, with a slightly softer personality. Evelyn doesn’t dare mention this in public, both because of the very real social penalties women face for badmouthing an ex, and because she’s pretty sure he took advantage of her research to build his new wife. This is a page-turning specfic story of cheating and murder, lies and loyalty, and also clones.

I enjoyed the premise of The Echo Wife so much, but I found the pacing slightly uneven, giving me kind of a choppy view of a fascinating situation. This was almost exactly how I felt about Magic for Liars, by the same author.

Martine, the cloned wife, has been made with most of Evelyn’s features, but with changes designed to make her a better wife.  She’s been designed to put Nathan first, in all ways, at all times.  If you’ve ever rushed to turn your “annoying” music off around your partner, its eerily familiar. (Bonus points for rushing to turn off the music that an ex thought was annoying.) Her sleeping schedule has been set for Nathan’s convenience. She has trouble with lying, but not in a robotic way, she just wasn’t created to reach the level of independent thought that little kids have when they discover secrets and lying.

The book doesn’t slow down for technobabble explanations, which I mostly liked. The timing of clone development is exactly how long is needed for the relationships to develop, without bothering to explain why it takes that long to grow an adult body and condition their mind.  But I also felt like this lab existed separately from the rest of our world, and I wanted some social explanations —  wouldn’t cloning, you know, affect other parts of society? Was Evelyn’s work in The Echo Wife pushing towards the kind of world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go?

The book continues to ask wild, wide, and thrilling specfic questions through the events of the story: Is a clone of murderer, who didn’t commit murder or remember murdering anyone, evil? Is he likely to repeat that, and is he deserving of punishment? Is an obedient wife who’s been taught to says she’s happy, actually happy? Does she want things, or just repeat that she’s been told to want them? How much can we use each other, believing there’s a greater good? What really is my identity, and how much of that comes from the people around me?

I found the ending of The Echo Wife frustrating and unsatisfying. Just like in Magic for Liars, when I kept wondering how the relationships and the crime could all possibly resolve, and then it just… didn’t. Again, I wondered how the complicated relationships and the crimes were all going to resolve, whether Martine and Evelyn would get away with it, whether a certain alcoholic ex-assistant would become a liability, and what Evelyn would do about that, what would happen with the clones’ lifespans and Violet, what Evelyn would do next, etc., and then it just ended.