Literature—unlike TV and film, essentially free of visual images—should offer a forum in which we can examine the lives of women without immediate appraisals of appearance. Yet the women who appear in our fiction are also unrealistically, disproportionately beautiful. From Pamela to Emma, Daisy Miller to Daisy Buchanan—the likes of poor Jane Eyre are wildly outnumbered. As Adelle Waldman has argued on the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, our most perceptive, fair-minded novelists recognize beauty as construct and contrivance, “a subject with profound repercussions for both men and women,” but most writers still casually create female characters who are near-perfect specimens anyway. Lionel Shriver, writing in New York magazine, talks about the temptation fiction writers face to “describe primary characters (especially women) as physically striking—on the assumption that […] being eye-catching will make them more likable.” In genre fiction, market pressures can be explicit. The fantasy writer Erika Johansen says that, while her novel The Tearling was in submission, several editors asked if she might revise her ordinary-looking heroine to “make her pretty.” More than 150 years after Brontë, sympathy for a female character is still yoked to physical beauty.

A critical study of literary and popular fiction, however, argues that the less-than-beautiful heroine has lately been ascendant. In Plain & Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction, editor and scholar Charlotte M. Wright plucks out a “thin but discernible thread of plain, at times even homely, heroines” and traces it to contemporary works by Alison Lurie, Russell Banks, Lorie Moore, Katherine Dunn, and others. The less-than-beautiful woman has been allowed to step out of her supporting roles as spinster and old maid and into stories of her own, Wright argues. For Wright, this movement represents a critique of our beauty-mad culture—one made most sharply when writers create female characters who aren’t just plain but explicitly ugly.

One such writer—not included in Wright’s survey but in many ways an exemplar of her argument—is the Swiss-German novelist, Peter Stamm, who with his recently published seventh work of fiction, All Days Are Night, has now produced two novels in a row centered on the complex, often subversive figure that is the ugly woman. Stamm is well established in Europe, where his methodical storytelling and precise, ultra-spare prose have garnered him several important literary prizes. He finally gained wider recognition in the U.S. with his last novel, Seven Years (2010). Its narrator, Alex, a handsome student of architecture, begins dating his colleague Sonia. She is intelligent, cultured, and so stunning that when she walks into a café, “the whole place turned to stare.” Simultaneously, Alex begins an affair with Ivona, an illegal Polish immigrant and Sonia’s opposite in nearly every way. Alex and Sonia marry and start an architectural firm together. But Sonia is sexually reserved—“like one of those dolls whose clothes are sewn onto their bodies”—and Alex can’t keep himself from continuing to visit Ivona.

The scenario is almost stock; Alex and Sonia are the ambitious and doomed professional couple from a thousand novels and films. What’s different here is Ivona:

Her face was puffy, and she wore her midlength hair loose. Presumably she had gotten a perm some time ago, but it had grown out, and her hair was hanging in her face. Her clothing looked cheap and worn. […] [H]er whole appearance was somehow sagging and feeble. She seemed to have given up all hope of ever pleasing anyone, even herself.

Yet she drives Alex to fits of lust. His attraction to Ivona baffles him, but he barely thinks of resisting it. Sonia proves hard work for Alex. Mute, servile, and dowdy Ivona, on the other hand, inflames him.