Customer Reviews

May We Borrow Your Husband?, and Other Comedies of the Sexual Life

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This collection of a dozen stories which focuses on relationships between couples was first published in 1967 and is a mixed bag that highlights Greene's strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

The best stories - May We Borrow Your Husband, Mortmain, Two Gentle People -combine the light touch of books like Travels With My Aunt with the darker side seen in Greene's novella Dr Fischer of Geneva.

The title story foreshadows Dr Fischer, published in 1980, and is a narrative by an older man who falls for a woman who is much younger than him.

In Dr Fischer, the narrator marries the girl but she conveniently dies leaving him to melancholy and sad musings.

In May We Borrow Your Husband, the narrator "loses" the girl he barely knows as she heads off to a life of domestic misery with a husband she does not realize is a homosexual.

The story is set in a hotel in Antibes and Greene skillfully portrays the cast of English characters - the plodding narrator whose own marriages have failed, the predatory caricature homosexual interior designers stalking the young man and the innocent lovebirds on their honeymoon.

Greene resists the temptation to turn the situation into a farce and the ending is abrupt and unsentimental.

The final story - Two Gentle People - is even bleaker. It also features a woman whose husband is a homosexual and a man whose wife is a drug addict. The couple meet, are attracted to each other but in the end know they must resist the temptation to start an affair and return to their partners and their loveless domestic lives.

Unfortunately, about half the stories are second rate farcical attempts at humor - The Over-Night Bag, A Shocking Accident, The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen. I am surprised that Greene even allowed them to be published.

More of a tragic comedy than anything. A series of short stories all with a twist into the lives of humanity.

The main story giving the title to the collection is absolutely exquisite. The narrator (Greene?) a writer who lingers in an Antibes hotel at the end of the summer to work quietly finds his peace unsettled by the arrival of a young newlyweds couple, whose male component is coveted by a couple of gay seducers. We see their unrelenting siege with the resigned eyes of the narrator, who tries to face the wolves with lame results.The characters are superbly depicted, but it's interesting to note that's one tale of seduction where we never see or hear the POV of the seduced.

When two gay men set their sights on an unhappy honeymooner in Italy, a disturbingly funny series of events take place. The story ends on a similar note, hilarious, and yet somewhat frightening.