Reviews for The Story of a Marriage

The average rating for The Story of a Marriage based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-27 00:00:00 Janette Hendel I read this novel after finishing Greer's "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," knowing nothing about the storyline. Having been utterly ignorant of the various plot twists, I was able to enjoy "Marriage" to the fullest. Yes, it's lyrical and poetic, as Greer is one of the most naturally gifted writers I've come across in years, but many literary novels get lost in this emphasis on stylistic narrative and character development, failing to realize that most readers come to fiction to simply be entertained by a good story. Greer avoids this elitist trap, and throws some revelatory moments at the reader that literally made me gasp aloud several times in public. Yeah, I was that guy in the cafe, voicing his thoughts to bound paper. So it goes. Don't read anything about the plot before picking up the book, not even the back cover if you can help it. In a culture in which movie trailers tell you the whole story before you see the films and book reviews dictate how you should feel about each book before turning to page one, try to go into this one like you're fumbling for a lightswitch in the dark. Wait til you see what's sitting in the room with you when the lights go on. At its core, "Marriage" is about the way we live our lives with others, never seeing those people for who they truly are, all along being misunderstood ourselves. But that's just a theme, and themes say nothing about a book really. Sorry, it's a tough book to rave about because ultimately it comes down to my saying, Just trust me. And if you're like me, you don't trust anyone who says Trust me. It's a tangle of thorns we have here.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-29 00:00:00 William Austin 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.