The Story of A Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
Quick Thoughts:
Do not be fooled by the feather weight of this book. Pardon my pugilist metaphors, but, I suppose marriage could be considered a prize fight, with a winner, a loser, a draw. Yes, a very bleak analogy, and quite telling, but let's not get into to that. Regardless of how you view marriage, Greer's book should certainly be ranked as a heavyweight among books. I will confess I rolled my eyes at the title, but still opened to the first page. I bought it immediately after reading the first sentence. This book will surprise you in the way any intimate relationship you've ever had has. You, the reader, think you know what a marriage is, thinkn you know your partner, you think you know these characters and their world. The reality is that we can never truly know another person. (Back to the boxing metaphors), After a few brief pages, the book suddenly switches from steady right jabs and throws a surprise left hook that knocks you out of your dogged assurance of who you think the narrator is, and blam!, you're on the ropes, realizing the sentence you just read changes everything you thought you knew, and this knowledge sends you scrambling to the corner to reread. Reading this book you realize assumptions say more about you than the words you speak. All the big issues of every age: politics, religion, gender, race, predilections, preferences, persuasions, are questioned and examined, stealthily.
First Sentence:
"We think we know the ones we love."
Favorite Parts:
"...you know the heart: every night, it grows a thorn." p. 34
"A whisper in my ear: "I need you to marry me." He might have said: "I need you to hide me." p. 41
"Like a protected witness, a life in our little house, calm as can be: a boy, a wife, a barkless dog.Some love in there, for all of us." --
"1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you've chopped one off, another war had begun." p. 45
"Life could be exchanged; could be better, what you'd dreamedd of; could be built on a cliff above the roaring world." p. 48
"A choice: ake this, or nothing." --
"What an attractive fantasy: to believe you could leave race problems behind." p. 52
"Holland chose--as men often have the luxury of choosing--to do nothing." p. 54
"It set the tone for our lives together, those days in a warm seled room, reading books in a whisper, terrified of discovery...Children hiding from our country,, that angry father." p. 57
"How hollow, to have no secrets left, you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone." p. 60
"I am sure we each loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we've married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person." p. 64
How remarkable we are, in our ability to hide things from ourselves--our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds: jelly fish floating on a vast dark sea of know and deciding...." p. 65
"I do not know wht joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain." p. 71
"I felt like a magician who has decided to retire, and one afternoon, over a drink, tells a younger man all of the secrets to his lifetime of tricks." p. 88
"What a cool, crisp silence we sat in." p. 105
"I thrust my arms out at the open sky, the clouds as bright and crenellated as the grass below, all of it moving, rustling, in the strong wind that smelles of the ocean." p. 125
"Something had been tugging at me throughout the dance, and it turned out to be just myself, as a girl, with some piece of hte past to show me." p. 137
"America, you give a lovely death." p. 147
"...that was how she wore themm, those blackened pearls; as a token, a holy relic around her neck." p. 150
"We would not fight to kill in a war or set the world aright, not for a country who disowned us..." p. 151
"A prison made entirely of light...Nothing keeps you from it; ther is no electric fence or wall around a life, a marriage." p. 153
"This is a war story. It was not meant to be. It started as a love sotry, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass." p. 156
Author Bio:
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune while garnering many other coast-to-coast honors. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, and his story collection, How It Was for Me, were also published to wide acclaim. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and other national publications, and have been anthologized most recently in The Book of Other People and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco.
He was born in Washington, DC, the son of two scientists. He studied writing at Brown University, where he was the Commencement Speaker at his own graduation. After years in New York working as a chauffeur, television extra and unsuccessful writer, he moved to Missoula, MT, where he received his MFA from the University of Montana. He soon moved to San Francisco and began to publish in magazines before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published to much acclaim in 2001, and his second book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, came out in 2004. John Updike first put this novel on the literary map when, in the pages of The New Yorker, he called it "enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov." Mitch Albom then chose Max for the Today Show Book Club and it soon became a bestseller. The New York Times has written that in his new novel, The Story of a Marriage, Greer ascends "to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." from bookbrowse
Best Reviews:
The New York Times Review:Comparisons to Proust, but ultimately makes a case that the novel has roots in Poe's lexicon.
NPR:Glowing review, an excerpt of the novel provided, as well as the author reading from the book.
Oprah.com:Brief review that piques interest.
The Independent:Not the most flattering of reviews, downright devil's advocate, but I like how the review conflates the opening line of Sylvia Plaths,s The Bell Jar with Greer's opening line, to make his case against heavy-handed symbolism, despite the beauty of the writing. Hmmmm.
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