The Story of a Marriage Book

Taking this to Kauai...

...So I took this on my trip because the plot intrigued me, and because I've been curious about Andrew Sean Greer's work for a long time, and, well, because its shortness pleased me. Weight is always a factor when choosing beach reading, isn't it?

Some of the prose here is lovely, although most of the time it strains to be lovely, making it less so. Greer likes to repeat phrases throughout the novel, such as, "We think we know the ones we love..." and usually these refrains sounded cheesy and obvious to me. It feels like Greer was nervous his readers wouldn't get the themes of the book, so he felt the need to announce them on every other page, all the while playing the violin and spraying lavender-gardenia-memory perfume in my face.

The weirdest thing about this book is that the narrator is a black woman talking about her marriage during the 1950s--but she doesn't reveal herself as a person of color until page 48. I have the feeling that Greer wanted to trick all of us readers who just assume whiteness on characters (how dare I!), and then say, "Aha! Gotcha!" It felt like trickery because there are many times in the first 47 pages that she would mention her race, or someone else's, and doesn't. For instance, when an important character first comes to her door, she mentions that he's blonde, not that he is white. Come on! A black woman in the 1950s opens her door and doesn't see race? I don't buy it, and it seems to me a failure in authentic perspective.

Greer also has a habit of being cryptic in scene and then making me wait to figure out what's going on. This didn't produce narrative drive, it just made me put the book down and reapply my sunscreen. Let's just say I didn't get sunburned until I started reading other books that caught my attention and kept it there.

Overall, the book was an easy read and often the passages about San Francisco in that era were fun, but I didn't understand the narrator's conflict and her motivations. And I even saw the ending coming...and that NEVER happens to me.