Customer Reviews

Lovers

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This novel is somewhat like a more sober (and less funny) version of "Same Time, Next Year", since it deals with a man and a woman (both married to others) who meet twice a week (as opposed to once a year) to indulge in their "exciting" fling. The story is told through the viewpoints of 3 different people: Benjy (yes, really), a frustrated husband reliving his teenage past; Marilyn, the restless suburban housewife; and Marilyn's husband Mo, who is painfully aware of the affair, but has had dalliances of his own long before Marilyn strayed.

Mo is easily the most entertaining to read, since he is a macho clod of a man who fancies himself an expert on women. Actually, he is amazingly unobservant. For instance, he fails to notice that one of his conquests has been in love with him for nearly 20 years; he also misses a basic fact involving the woman's heritage. Both his wife and teenage son pick up on these things instantly. Also, his heart is in the right place when he suggests that Marilyn needs to get a job to occupy herself, but his naive assumption that Marilyn (unlike himself) will be too busy to continue her fling is all too typical. Mo is not the sensitive, nurturing type by a long shot, and his hard-edged cynicism is about the only thing that makes this novel worth the long read.

Marilyn is as flighty as Mo's description, and even her narration of how she and Benjy "just happened" to jump into bed together is unconvincing. It reads like a silly screenplay...picnics and beer lead to sex, which leads to...LOVE. Which, of course, prompts them to do it on a regular basis, even though they live in the same town and have 6 kids between them. Marilyn seems to crave sensitivity, which Mo definitely lacks, but at the beginning of the book, she is also lonely and has no close friends in the same city. This, somehow, escalates into an off-and-on "romance" with a man she was not even attracted to at first meeting.

Benjy's chapters are easily the most boring to read; his high-toned "professor-speak" and rambling, nearly incoherent sentences make it a virtual chore to get through a single paragraph. Also, his simplistic view that his lust for Marilyn is an addiction "like overeating" is rather irritating, given his proclamations of love for her. We never learn exactly what is wrong with the relationship between him and his wife, Becky; apparently, we're supposed to accept that Becky is too "frowsy", "pregnant" and "big sisterly" to turn him on. Becky, you see, is a baby machine. So why'd he marry her? Do people just marry for looks now? Stupid stupid stupid. Likewise, Marilyn indicates that Mo's affairs throughout their marriage made her "feel bad sometimes", but Miss Passive-Aggressive wouldn't dream of actually SAYING any of this to her lusty husband. At the end of the book, I felt none of the emotions I was supposed to feel--I just thought, "Do these people DESERVE EACH OTHER or what?" Norma Klein has done much better. Read "The World As It Is" instead; it's a horrifying and sometimes twistedly humorous look at life in a mental hospital.