Just the beginning of the tale

Early on in Andrew Sean Greer's THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE, I became convinced someone was pulling a hoax on me. I reached a scene about a quarter of the way through this slim second novel in which one member of a couple is being warned by some soon-to-be-in-laws. The member of the couple is looking back on this scene, in which the soon-to-be-in-laws plead with this person not to go through with the wedding for reasons they can't quite articulate, from the position where we know the couple has already gone through with it. And I thought, "Hey! Did I go to the library and accidentally pick up THE GOOD SOLDIER again?"

The scene is a near-exact double, and in both cases this Cassandra-esque warning (coming from elderly aunts in both books, I think) ends up bearing out in various ways. In this book, it's Pearlie, a young woman who moved to California during World War II to work in the war effort, who is being warned against her fiance and childhood sweetheart Holland, whom she happened to encounter on the streets of San Francisco years after he was sent away to war. They have defied the aunts and are living in a family house together with their son, and one day, a man from Holland's past comes to town.

And that's pretty much all I want to reveal about the plot of this book, which given that it's under 200 pages is quite complex and developing throughout the story. (If you just want spoilers, pretty much every review I read of this book including the Times' word on it gives away everything. Why?! Have you no shame, reviewers of the world?)

I thought I knew what THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE was about, given a friend's review which hinted very strongly at one outcome, but I actually had no idea -- and it leads back to this parlor scene, as I mentioned. This book is like a puzzle box where, when you turn it a certain way, pieces suddenly pop out and confound your understanding of the mechanism.

Like Edward in THE GOOD SOLDIER, Pearlie takes the aunts' words to mean that her spouse-to-be has a weak heart, but that makes her even more stubborn in her desire to take care of him, which begins to show when bad stuff starts to happen. And truly, horrible things happen to people in this book. When we finally learn who this stranger is and how he met Holland, it is incredible that we have been living with this guy for 175 pages and all of this is in his past. And while I never completely bought that, when Pearlie reaches an impasse, she would really go through with one of the choices, it was still heart-wrenching to see her there.

Maybe it's just because my expectations were lowered when I believed it to be a novel essentially about one theme. My mom lent me this book once called THE ALL OF IT, I think her book club was reading it, and there is one revelation in the entire thing. The title is probably too apt because when you hit that paragraph, you're like, "Oh, so that's the entire book." (MIDDLESEX has the same twist in it but buries it in a way that animates everything else before and after.)

It's funny that I happened to read two novels set in the 1950s so close together, but I didn't like this book as much as REVOLUTIONARY ROAD -- this one will have to wait a while before I go back and re-read it, so as not to erode its charms. But I especially recommend it for those of you in the crowd who want to write novels. THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE is so neat and economical, and yet in effect so devastating.