Andrew Sean Greer (born in 1970 in Washington, D.C.) has written three novels that dare to flout the "Write about what you know" exhortation and that boldly fly into the high-velocity head-wind of rampant suspicion that anyone can write about kinds of people the author is not. In The Story of a Marriage, his most recently published novel, his narrator is a housewife in San Francisco's Outer Sunset district (practically in the Pacific Ocean on Noriega and 47th Avenue--there is only one more avenue beyond 47th) during the early 1950s.

Although looking back to youth, The Story of a Marriage is mostly about love -- an intense love that the older Pearlie Cook recalls for her beautiful and fragile husband Holland, the intense love another had for him, and the very odd conspiracy the two lovers developed unbeknownst to Holland.

Pearlie is philosophical rather than angry. More than any other novel I can think of, The Story of a Marriage has a thesis sentence at the very start: "We think we know the ones we love." Pearlie continues: "Our husbands, our wives. . . . We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know." The rest of the intricately constructed book shows how and when this lesson was thrust upon her. Over the course of the relatively short novel, she recounts learning how little she knew about Holland, even though she and he lived in intense isolation à deux, first in the rural South, then in the burgeoning quasi-suburban ocean-edge of San Francisco.

Greer throws some surprises to readers who think they know more than Pearlie, and I don't want to reveal anything at all about what Pearlier learned about her husband's character and the past between their two bouts of isolation à deux. She knew the reason for the first of these, and conceived both of them as protecting the delicate, beautiful Holland.

The prose of the book is beautiful. There are wonderful images and affecting repetitions. The topic/thesis sentence is repeated very tellingly. The unfolding of the plot is brilliant and I was tempted to race through the book to find out what Pearlie learned and how she learned that there was so much she did not know, but forced myself to slow down to savor the elegantly honed sentences.

I accept Pearlie as a credible character. Could someone unschooled compose such a memoir? Probably not, but the prose is so powerful and perfect that I was more than willing not to dwell on that.

I was also a bit skeptical (or at least skeptical) that this character would follow the Rosenberg spy trials and rejected appeals so closely, but she is not particularly interested in the geopolitical consequences (the Soviet Union getting atomic bomb technology information). What interests her is Ethel sticking by her man -- all the way to the electric chair. It is the devoted wife that interests Pearlie, not treason and espionage, etc. And how Pearlie should stand by her man is a puzzlement to her.

And she must look out for their polio-stricken child "Sonny." When push comes to shove, she must protect the one most in need of protection (there's no real question about who that is, though she sees both husband and son as fragile and in need of her protection).

Contra-Updike

At an appearance at the San Francisco Public Library (more fully described at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/834033/andrew_sean_greers_new_novel_the_story.html?cat=38), Greer was asked him if he reads reviews. He said that his agent only sends positive ones, shielding him rather as the novel's Pearlie shields Holland (she cuts stories that she thinks might upset him out of the daily morning paper, the San Francisco Chronicle). I had kept myself from asking about his reactions to John Updike's review of The Story of a Marriage in the New Yorker, but it would have been impossible for Greer not to have found out about that review.

A few years back, Updike published a very admiring review of The Confessions of Max Tivoliin the New Yorker, but was markedly less enthusiastic about The Story of a Marriage. When I read the review, I had been puzzled by some carelessness about what is not in the realm of interpretation in Updike's review (referring to the narrator as Pearl, though she is invariably Pearlie in the book; moving the couple out of San Francisco and across the Golden Gate), rejected Updike's judgment about the believability of the (emotional extravaganze of the) third person in the triangle, and vexed by the extent to which Updike's review gives away what should be surprises for readers. It was also puzzling that Updike (my favorite book by whom is Buchanan Dying, set firmly in the mid-19th century) had suddenly decided that fiction set in the past cannot be convincing.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli is set in a past not quite as distant as that of James Buchanan, but the present time of the narration is decades later than what Pearlie is remembering and explaining. It thus, legitimately (in its narrator's placement within history/time) is a post-1950s perspective on the 1950s.

Once the specter of Updike's review (which praised Greer as a writer about love and its sorrows) came up, I wanted to ask Greer if he thought that the disbelief Updike expressed came from Updike being old enough to remember the early 1950s. I did not ask so leading a question and we delighted that without any suggestion from the question, Greer suggested that Updike has his own view of what the early 1950s was like. I was happy to add that his 1950s experiences were surely unlike those of a dependent wife on the West Coast.

(For photos and more on the Q&A and reading see http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/834033/andrew_sean_greers_new_novel_the_story.html?cat=38.)

Reviews of Greer's earlier books:

How It Was for Me (reviewed by KC Howell)
The Path of Minor Planets
The Confessions of Max Tivoli




Recommended: Yes