No, this is not about the recent burst of same sex marriages in California, although it also has to do with California...
The Story of a Marriage (Andrew Sean Greer, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 208 pp.) is unfortunately a dull novel. Greer's previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, published four years ago, was a bestseller.
Here the story is told through the voice of a woman, Pearlie Cook,
remembering her youth at the end of her life: how in the early fifties
the appearance one day at her door of a stranger claiming to know her
husband transformed her life. The first words of the novel are
promising: "We think we know the ones we love."
Set up in San Francisco, where Greer lives, the story is just not
credible and seems artificially constructed, with several unexpected
revelations along the plot. The book is beautifully written though, but
the style does not realistically match the narrator's background...
In her very positive review in the FT earlier this month, Married to a stranger ("A thrilling portrayal of a relationship unraveling"), Melissa McClements reminds us that when The Confessions of Max Tivoli was published in 2004, John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, compared Greer to Proust and Nabokov... The New York Times also published two very positive reviews in April (Amid Social Shifts, a Wife of the ’50s Tries to Piece Together Her Shattered World) and May (The Fog of Love)... I still found this short novel boring...
2008.07.27
