The Court of Common Pleas [Hardcover]

Alexandra Marshall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2001

Marshall has the essential novelist’s gift, the creation of vivid characters,” said the New York Times. In her new novel, she has again created a cast both real and vibrant.
At sixty-three, Judge Gregory Brennan is on the brink of retirement. With his youngest daughter headed for college, he envisions traveling abroad, basking in a repose that his demanding career has not allowed, with his wife, Audrey, at his side. But Audrey has other ambitions. At forty-nine, she sees the mythic empty nest as an opportunity to explore her own potential — as a medical student. When Audrey reveals her plans, Greg-ory is overwhelmed, and he emotionally retreats, causing a rift that neither one of them ever anticipated.
Marshall has been praised for her insight into the complexities of modern marriage, capturing it as “an institution about competing needs and shifting wants” (Baltimore Sun). In THE COURT OF COMMOM PLEAS, marriage is not unlike the general trial court where Gregory presides. But the ruling in Gregory and Audrey’s own case remains to be seen. Can their disparate life plans be mediated and their differences reconciled? Marshall offers a nuanced portrait of a marriage in the throes of a midlife crisis and reveals, with an encompassing kindness, the tenderness, frustration, bewilderment, and ultimately the joy of a marriage willed to endure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although Marshall (Something Borrowed) has proven herself to be a keen-eyed and meticulous observer of marriage, her latest novel is a weary, joyless glimpse into a lopsided Cleveland partnership. Audrey, almost 50, and Gregory, 63, have been faithfully and contentedly married for 20 years, raising their two daughters in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Cleveland Heights. Yet when Audrey, a nurse, breaks the news that she has just been accepted into medical school, Gregory, a judge who is still reeling from the premature death of his dear friend and colleague Rob Wallace, (over)reacts as if his wife has betrayed him. Why has she not told him of her desire to become a doctor, and what else is she hiding? Manipulating constantly shifting points of view, Marshall tirelessly cross-examines each spouse's burdened intentions through years of plotting a life together: Gregory still bears the unhealed wound of his father's early suicide, while Audrey has not properly expressed her resentment at her husband's resistance to change. The heavy-handed layering of detail feels obligatory rather than essential, and when she does introduce a compelling plot twist, such as Gregory's transference of amorous feeling to Wallace's widow, Karen, Marshall dampens the effect by making Karen as unappealing as possible. The couple's two college-aged daughters are similarly and ungenerously criticized by their parents as being unsympathetic. There isn't much to delight readers in this dry, gray-shaded portrait of a marriage, and with three far-fetched similes and four metaphors on the first page alone, the reading experience is tedious indeed. Author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Marshall, whose recent stock in trade is examining modern marriage, presents an age gap threatening a long-term relationship. During their 20 years of marriage, Audrey and Gregory Brennan considered themselves contemporaries. But the trajectories of their lives seem likely to diverge when 49-year-old Audrey, an expert nurse, is accepted for medical school without telling her husband she'd applied, and 63-year-old Gregory, a judge, is considering retiring to travel the world with his wife at his side. At the same time their older daughter, Val, who's struggling with college and life in general, is injured in a single-car accident, and Gregory, mourning the unexpected death of his 41-year-old colleague and protege Rob Wallace, takes a limited surrogate father role for Rob's two young sons and is attracted to Rob's widow, a woman he hadn't even liked. Although the outcome never seems in doubt, the situations are ripe for analysis. Marshall provides that analysis at considerable length in prose that's overburdened with similes and circuitous phrases, so that reaching that outcome is not the pleasure it might have been. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; F edition (July 17, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395967945
• ISBN-13: 978-0395967942
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,177,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars didn't quite do it for me--and here's why, July 27, 2006

By 

lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Court of Common Pleas: A Novel (Paperback)

I usually like family stories--where a contemporary family works through real life problems and their relationships with each other and other people. This book didn't make it for several reasons. The most important I think is that the basic premise of a husband nearing retirement age and a wife wanting to start medical school at age 50 was not enough to sustain an entire book. There wasn't enough substance to the conflict set up. I was more interested in the couple's daughters than I ever was in them. The book is also full of pretentious description, with awful and irrelevant similes and metaphors that give me the idea the author is just trying to show how LITERARY she can be. To risk sounding like her, reading the story was like slogging through a lagoon choked with underwater weeds. She uses horrible comparisons, some more than once. Like: [person] used pockets of time like jacket pockets full of wadded up kleenex and loose coins. And: Barges on the Cuyahoga River looked like food making its way through the city's intestinal tract. Yuck! The worst blooper of them all, at least on my copy, is the publisher's blurb, which describes a main character named Anthony Clifford (both on the cover and inside). The main character is named Gregory Brennan. Not even close. What are they doing at Houghton Mifflin, mixing up their own books? I wouldn't recommend this even for a summer read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Plodding, February 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Court of Common Pleas (Hardcover)

The writing style is pedestrian, the characters wooden -- I could hardly bear to read it and gave up about 2/3 of the way through. The story has potential but this novel remains at a Writing 101 level.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Court of Common Pleas, September 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Court of Common Pleas (Hardcover)

I would like to strongly warn anyone against buying this book. The experience of reading this novel for me was at best tedious, and at worst, painful. I'm sure Ms. Marshall believes that she has crafted an insightful, realistic drama but I don't believe that she has accomplished anything admirable in this book. She moves her characters around like puppets, each one "representing" a different type, but completely lacking any personality. One after another, in an endless drone, we hear them whining. I read through to the end, in the vain hope that the story would ultimately prove compelling, but that was definitely not to be the case with this dismal book.