The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

The haunting questions in Andrew Sean Greer’s exquisite new novel resonate with us all: “What do you want from life? Could you even say?” We might be able to articulate a general idea — say, that reliable old standby “I want to be happy.” But such plainspoken desire may wobble in light of the awful but undeniable truth: “We think we know the ones we love. … But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know.”

Revealing secrets in layers as delicate as onionskin, The Story of a Marriage explores the nature of love and connection and human frailty set against a backdrop of war and repression. Author of the poignant The Confessions of Max Tivoli, in which a man ages backward through time, Greer has an intrepid imagination, an uncanny ability to bring the past to rumbling life and a surprising mastery of tension.

The Story of a Marriage unfolds in the shadow of one war and the defining memories of another, a domestic drama as suspenseful as any mystery. It’s a finely structured whodunnit about the confusion inherent in matters of the heart.

“Max Tivol’s” opening line — “We are each the love of someone’s life” — feels appropriate here. For narrator Pearlie Cook, a housewife living in Sunset District of San Francisco, that love is her husband Holland, her childhood sweetheart and father to their Sonny. It is 1953, and Americans are “full of worries about the Korean War, race issues, the Rosenbergs, the Communists…the Russian bombs being prepared and inscribed like voodoo charms with our names.” The sacrifices of World War II are still vivid for Pearlie and for those like the fragile Holland, whose mind, she believes, wanders back too often to the desperation of those years.

But Pearlie has willed herself to be content. She has reason to be happy, doesn’t she? She has managed to escape her hardscrabble Kentucky town, and young Sonny, legs locked in braces by polio, is far too young to be drafted. Holland is staggeringly handsome, “like something beaten out of gold, so that even if you bent it or melted it down it would always be a pure, beautiful thing.” And if the bulk of Pearlie’s time is spent smoothing the edges of reality for him — finding a dog that doesn’t bark, installing a doorbell that coos instead of rings, censoring the newspaper of upsetting stories — well, the efforts are part of her promise: “Let me take care of you.”

Occasionally an uneasiness niggles. Holland’s aunts had warned her: Don’t marry him. Holland is flawed, somehow — “bad blood, a crooked heart,” they said — but Pearlie refused to abandon him. “I pictured it like a slide shown in a darkened medical classroom: poor Holland, born with a defect, his heart hanging over on his right side like a cherry.” And then a stranger appears at her front door one day with a shocking offer and one blinding prism of truth about Holland, and domestic bombshells begin to rain.

Greer doles out revelations with grace and precision — there are surprises in this novel, and it is best to surrender to them without preconceptions. Greer’s prose, as in Max Tivoli, is unerringly poetic as he unearths images of Holland’s aunts “unhelpfully placing themselves like cats in an unmade bed” or Pearlie’s view of Holland as “a ghost breaking dishes so someone will know he is there.” Like his intuitive narrator, Greer holds few illusions about nostalgia for the good old days, deftly illustrating the fears and prejudices of the ’50s — racial, sexual, political. “Fluoridation,” Pearlie reports, “seemed like a horrible new invention.”

A recurring image of Ethel Rosenberg runs through Pearlie’s days and dreams as she tries to understand what she wants. (Not bad blood. Not a crooked heart.) Why, she wonders, won’t Ethel confess? In the end, though, she comes to learn what we all know: Marriage can be an inscrutable business. “Anyone watching a ship from land is no judge of its seaworthiness, for the vital part is always underwater. It can’t be seen.” What can be seen plainly on every page of this slim, lovely novel is Greer’s prodigious talent.