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The Fly in the Ointment (Penguin Fiction)

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Lili, the speaker, has just returned to England from her home in Egypt, ostensibly for the opening of her husband Robert's art exhibition in a London gallery. Usually a free spirit, she finds herself "empty and cold and sad" in England, and, as a result, is contemplating renewing an old amour to perk up her life, a "cure" she has tried more than once before. Aware that she depends on Robert, who is "my mother and my child and without him I [am] desolate," she also chafes at the bonds of marriage: "The thing about marriage is that it must be exclusive." Lili and Robert are staying in England with an old friend of Lili's from school in Egypt, a woman who is planning the imminent marriage of her twenty-year-old daughter Margaret to a much older man with whom Lili has a history.

Through Lili's meanderings around town, we meet the various characters involved with the wedding and are exposed to their different attitudes toward marriage: The gloomy bride does not love her fiancé but intends to go through with the wedding; the older fiancé needs to acquire the trappings and seeming stability of marriage but is still seeing other women; the bride's mother, divorced from a man who has a horrifying secret, believes that "only a fool would marry for love; and the groom's mother, Mrs. Monro, divorced after her's husband's betrayal, has simply gone on with her life, alone. Lili ponders whether her own need to associate with Mrs. Monro us because she is trying "to gain her strength, to identify with her" as she contemplates her own infidelity, secure in Robert's love.

Love and marriage are examined with reference to each character's strength or dependence, sense of commitment or willingness to betray, and expectations and disappointments. Echoes of the Adam, Eve, and Lilith story pervade the action. Lili's complexity--her surprising vulnerability hidden behind the façade of liberation--adds weight to this sensitive and very funny examination of marriage as an institution. Mary Whipple