Sleeping Arrangements (English, Paperback, Madeleine Wickham)

In Sleeping Arrangements we meet Chloe, whose husband Philip is facing a possible layoff, and her two children, Sam, who at sixteen is on the cusp of manhood (apparently), and Nat, a cute eight year old. Chloe thinks her family desperately needs a holiday and so she accepts a friend’s offer to use his Spanish villa. She’d like Philip to forget, just for a week, that he could be out of a job (good luck with that Phil) and enjoy their time together under a blazing Spanish sun.

However, when they arrive at the villa, another family has already settled in. Hugh is a successful management consultant and his wife Amanda is an uptight but caring stay-at-home mother of their two toddler daughters. Hugh hopes that this holiday will help him reconnect with his wife as well as get closer to his young children, who prefer their mother.
The families have been double-booked by the villa owner, who as we soon realize has been playing a game. Because there are two unfortunate links here – the first being that Chloe and Hugh have a dramatic history as lovers. The second falls into spoiler territory but it makes for a very uncomfortable situation.
Of the four main characters, Chloe and Hugh are – for obvious reasons given their behavior – the least sympathetic. However, Wickham spends the majority of time telling the story from their points of view with only brief detours through “good guy” Philip’s head as well as through those of the au pair Jenna and the boy Sam. For some reason, Amanda does not ever warrant a dedicated point of view. This not only accentuated the lopsided nature of the novel; it also left the reader short-changed, because she could have been one of the more interesting characters.
In addition, despite my wanting to consign both Chloe and Hugh to the fiery depths of relationship hell, the plot develops in such a way that I was forced to read on as they are made to float up to the heavens. I truly disliked Chloe and Hugh. She is a very strong woman who unfairly expects all those around her to be as strong all the time, every time and he is a very weak man who lays blame on everyone but himself for all of his life’s troubles (of which there are really not many). I had no idea why they were ever together, and why, given how their relationship ended, how anything could be ‘unresolved’; the “unexpected romance” and the “fiery passions” as described in the book description were distasteful.
I felt sorry for Philip and Amanda. They deserved better.
All that said, I read Sleeping Arrangements in one sitting. Madeleine Wickham is Sophie Kinsella’s real name and she uses it for her contemporary women’s fiction. The writing style isn’t really that similar element by element, though the end result is a very easily readable book is the same. If I hadn’t known Wickham and Kinsella were one and the same beforehand, I would not have linked the two. Even knowing this and looking for similarities, I can’t find enough to say that “if you like Kinsella, you will like Wickham” or vice versa. However, this is my first novel by Wickham and though it was re-released in 2008, it was originally published in 2001. Perhaps if I were to read a more recent story, this would change. One element I did miss from Kinsella’s work is the humor which runs through not just plot but dialogue. Perhaps that would have lightened up an otherwise depressing and fist-clench-inducing story for me.
Outside of the drama between the couples, I was extremely surprised at the handling of the relationship between the au pair Jenna and Sam. I think it is safe to say that the characters in Sleeping Arrangements follow a different moral compass to mine and this severely impaired my enjoyment of the story.