Customer Reviews

The Country of Marriage

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Just when I thought there was not one man in this world who understood themselves, let alone other men, I stumble onto this book. Giardina writes such truth. His voice hits the mark on every imaginable relationship. It is hard to except such weak, yet successful, crap fiction from say....Nicholas Sparks, when there is an intelligent writer like Giardina, in the wings, waiting to save us all. Read this and recomend the book to your friends who give a damn. You will not be disappointed.

Giardina does an interesting job of getting inside the heads of men who can't effectively communicate what they feel or need to the significant others in their lives, but their interior thoughts over their frustrations with life are beautifully written in passages that border on poetry. Not all the characters are likeable. Many of the characters - such as the narrators of "I Live in Yonville" and "Love, Your Parents" - are self-satisfied to the point of being obnoxious but the stories ultimately lead you to feel compassion for them because Giardina so effectively portrays how deluded all that self-satisfaction has led them to be. Common themes across all the stories are the stifling impact of life in the suburbs, and the compromise it represents from the dream that boys (and in one story, a woman) had for their lives.

The 9 stories in the collection are:

1. I Live In Yonville - 14 pp - A man ruminates, smugly at first but then rather desperately, about the routine-ness of his life as a suburban middle-class husband and father. (The title comes from the fact that the man is proud of himself for having read Flaubert, and he knows his life bears a similarity to Emma Bovary's and Emma lived in Yonville.)

2. Days with Cecilia - 25 pp - An exploration of what can happen to a marriage after the birth of a child, and how a spouse can become totally absorbed in the child and lose interest in sex. But there is an interesting twist on this common predicament. Here it's the husband who lives solely for the baby. He is the primary caregiver, and his wife, the primary breadwinner, is the one who started an affair to get some physical attention.

3. The Lake - 25 pp - A young firefighter is living the life he dreamed about as a kid until his wife experiences a post-partum depression. He begins an affair with the wife of a good friend he has known since high school when the friend and his wife (then girlfriend) were the "star" couple of the school. The affair makes the firefighter envision a new life (represented by swimming up through the surface of a lake in a dream). But all goes wrong when the cuckolded friend learns of his wife's adultery and explodes in a violent range - a scene the firefighter is there to witness.

4. Love, Your Parents - 22 pp-- Another smug, unlikeable narrator, this time a 36-year-old man who brags about not paying child support after he loses his job and his marriage and has to move back in with his parents. An interesting, well-told portrait of a cad.

5. The Cut of His Jib - 23 pp - A dashing young lawyer moves with his family into a suburban neighborhood. The 15-year-old boy who mows his lawn keeps watching him, thinking he stands above the typical men in the neighborhood. But the lawyer gets his comeuppance when he tries to demonstrate he's a different cut of man. His attempt backfires. In the end, the other men can smugly prove he's not only not better, he may even be beneath them.

6. The Secret Life - 40 pp - A man enjoys having an affair not because he doesn't love his wife, but only because he enjoys having a secret life. But the wife has surprises in store of him that may change the whole dynamic of his life.

7. The Challenge of the Poet - 21 pp - A women is living the quintessential "quiet life of desperation" with children and an attentive, but now boring husband. The only spark she has is the poet who travels in their circles for half the year when he's not off at writing conferences or teaching at colleges. But one night the poet will put a challenge to her by forcing her to consider whether she has the courage to make any changes in her comfortable life.

8. The Second Act - 19 pp - A re-imagining of what F. Scott Fitzgerald's life would have been like if he hadn't died at 44 and instead finished the Last Tycoon and brought the now thoroughly immersed in depression Zelda back to live with him. In this future that never happened, Fitzgerald is interestingly trying to create the past he once had, discovering along the way that it's nearly impossible to do so.

9. The Films of Richard Egan - 14 pp - Charts the career of the real-life actor, from the late 1950s to early 1960s who was just on the verge of attaining lead actor status, but who always had events (costarring in a film with Elvis) and circumstances (the youthful audience in the early 60s starting to drive all moviemaking decisions) conspire against him. His career is played against the life of a boy who watches his movies, and ends up wondering if his life will deliver on his dreams or end up being a series of compromises.

I have never read a short story that's any better than "The Films of Richard Egan".It's a knockout!

I was trying to figure out why I liked this book so much because subject matter and other things were so bourgeois and a little pretentious - poets and professional type people drinking wine, listening to Jazz, going to therapy, driving semi yuppie cars, reading classics and watching foreign flicks. Despite all of that, it occurred to me, on my third or fourth reading of the first story, "I live in Yonville," that Giardina transcends. Without committing the sin of profundity, he reaches so deep (especially the first story, which, in my opinion, outshines the run of the mill contemp. lit. found in magazines and journals today and even the stories in this collection). He's got IT, as a writer. Reading Gardina is like getting high. He santifies those precious things we merely feel, on that touch and go level, though, we know it to be worth so much more.

There are at most a handful of male writers whose honest portrayals of male psyches ring true, and Giardina is certainly one of them. What's special about these stories is that men reveal their lives with women and children as the measure of themselves. And though the stories revolve around one theme, the voices vary; there is a scarily ruthless loser; a couple of men looking back on adolescence; but best, men talking themselves toward deeper commitment. If I didn't have a wonderful husband, I'd be jealous of this writer's wife!

Ever since reading "Days with Cecilia" in Harper's , I have looked for stories by Anthony Giardina everywhere. The Country of Marriage has fulfilled my need for stories that are written as I think - but in an elegant and beautiful country of words. The truth in these stories, written without regard for sniveling needs for ostentations or pretensions, is a fine breath of air after all the smoggy stuff now available. These are stories about the human spirit and ALL relationships and likely to appeal to anyone with sensitivity.

There are only two writers whose work I have read and have truly been amazed that the way they write is the way people think: Grace Paley and Anthony Giardina. He knows the ways men and women act towards one another and makes some of the best art anyone would ever want to read. Plain and simple.

The Country of Marriage was great. It had a good beginning middle and end