Customer Reviews

Marriage: A Duet

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought a copy of this novel for myself, based on my familiarity with the author's essays on public tv and the Oprah review. I expected it to be good, but it is stunningly good. It is beautifully written and the characters have depth--she writes about the aftermath of infidelity and pain with truth and compassion. I'm recommending it for my book group as our next selection.

Marriage, A Duet is two novellas linked by a common thread, grief over adultery. The stories examine infidelity and the ultimate consequences it has on a marriage. One is told from the perspective of a woman and the other from a man. A Married Woman...After 40 years of marriage it has come down to Caroline Betts keeping a careful vigil over her husband's deathbed. And at each occurence of the rising and setting of the sun she relives moments of their marriage. Caroline loves her husband and has some wonderful memories, but what she remembers most is when her husband of then 25 years, fell in love and consummated that love with a younger woman. Caroline is not a talker, so she deals with the betrayal primarily in her own head and we are only privy to her calm icy thoughts about the affair, her husband's voice is not shared with readers. This story is packed with domestic details and hard truths as Ms. Fleming gives readers a combination of sorrow and residual anger along with flashes of relief and optimism. A Married Man...In the second novella David and Marcia Sanderson are trying to put their relationship back together after her liaison with one of David's clients. His anger forces him into a perverse near-madness state because he externalizes his grief over his wife's betrayal, he'd always felt his marriage and his wife were just one baby step short of perfection. A distraught David wonders why the truth is so valuable, if it would have been better if she had just not told him, or if she'd lied to him instead. The writer introduces self-help groups and the use of pharmacology to help their marriage, but when none of this removes his bitterness, David resolves "no more groups, no more pills, and no more shrinks". He will try to put things together himself, but is his love real enough to forgive, and will there be a happy ending to this marriage? First time novelist Anne Taylor Fleming, a nationally recognized journalist, has written stories that are illuminating and almost unbearably human. They are packed with marital issues that put our senses on alert about the least understood of all human endeavors: staying happily married. These stories make for excellent studies. Reviewed by aNN Brown

Two views of what damage infidelity within marriages can do.

For readers who relish the complexities of two people making a life together, the dialogues ring true & the situations are both delicately funny & seriously telling.

Anyone who has been espoused will know of what this author writes, & will find some interesting information to take back to their marriage.

I normally don't choose "novellas" to read but the title of this book caught my eye. I was pleasantly surprised by the content of the book and the two "short" stories it contained. The stories are written in a concise, sometimes shocking, intense manner. "A Married Woman" is about a woman married for many years who is recalling the details of her husbands infidelity as she sits by his deathbed.
"A Married Man" is the story of a man who is trying to find forgiveness for his wife's infidelity. It is a heartwrenching story of a father and husband who loves his wife very much but is not able to get beyond her one night affair with an acquaintance.
I think the reader of this book will thoroughly enjoy it. It is a quick read but contains such food for thought.

In Her Absence by Antonio Munoz Molina

as well as

Conjugal Love by Alberto Moravia

are far better books in analyzing relationships. Both involve a self-conscious narrator who analyzes his relationship - often seeing it with the clarity that could have saved it but also often deluding himself to keep it going when it is obvious (to the reader) that it is over.

I should say that though I tried to read Marriage, I did not read it completely. I skipped through the first novella and found it mildly interesting but it did not engage me enough to keep at it. I returned the book unread even though it was a short novel and I had picked it up at the library because I was intrigued by the theme of the stories.

The author of these captivating novellas moves skillfully from the grief stricken interior lives of the betrayed to the slick, sometimes comical social worlds they inhabit. The prose, at times, is snapshot specific. Fleming's ear for dialogue is not always perfect but all the rest is poetry. To be sure, the Southern California characters have a certain type of glamour, but their pain is deep and real. No, this isn't Anna Karenina, but it's just as painful, a lot shorter, and, at times, a lot funnier.

Anne Taylor Fleming is best known to me as an essayist on the News Hour, usually commenting on the world from the perspective of LA, which I don't usually appreciate all that much.

Surprising here, especially considering the subject of infidelity, she manages to lose most of the LA pretentiousness in both of these two short novels, despite the fact that both stories are set in LA. Her characters really care about their marriages, their children, what has happened in their lives up to the time of the infidelity and after. Not that all is well--the wronged parties agonize in ways that are highly recognizable (at least to me) over their partner's respective indiscretions.

Perhaps these novels work because she has imagined or observed the reactions of these wronged spouses rather than actually lived them herself and can, therefore, maintain an appropriate detachment (and humor). At any rate, the characters come off as real and engaging and people you would want to meet yourself, unlike many LA characters I've met in the pages of contemporary fiction.

Well done and recommended!

I found the pain in this book very real. Two sides of the same story. I found it interesting to see how Carolina and David handled their emotions and their lives. However, I take exception to the other reader reviewer who gave it one star after admitting not reading the first and only skimming the second novella. Is that fair to an author?

Anne Taylor Fleming tells two different stories dealing with relationship between husband and wife. The first novella, "A Married Woman," features Caroline. She's a devoted wife and mother sitting by her husband's hospital bed day after day where he lays in a coma.

She is forced to remember how wonderful their marriage started out and how in love they were. But she's also forced to take good, hard look at what their relationship developed into and must deal with the emotional turmoil that his infidelities with a younger woman left her with. Caroline must face the reality of the ups and downs of the life spent together and with the reality of spending the rest of her life without him.

The second novella, "A Married Man," showcases the life of David a loving husband, father and successful businessman who is dealing with the betrayal of his wife, Marcia. His life is turned upside down emotionally due to his wife's one night romp through the sheets with another man.

Marcia doesn't try to hide it from him and claims it was just a one time thing she never meant to do. Now she wants to try and mend their battered relationship by going to counseling.

Much of the story takes place in a marriage counselor's office where David's mind wanders throughout the sessions to better times. Times when they were happy and loving towards each other.

He begins to doubt they will ever be able to get that back and doesn't know if he'll ever be able to forgive and forget. He must decide if what they had is worth a second try.

These two absorbing novellas each revolve around an act of infidelity by one spouse, and the reactions of the other. In the first one, "A Married Woman," a wronged wife struggles silently to keep her marriage together after her husband falls seriously in love with one of their daughter's friends. In the second, "A Married Man," a husband struggles noisily to forgive his wife her single, casual indiscretion, which she unwisely confessed to him. In the second novella, the wife's efforts to win back her husband seem quite a bit over the top, but otherwise this exploration of festering hurt and unforgiving anger on the part of the husband rings very true. Some people really do enjoy being angry and unforgiving, and as a reader I had no trouble relating to that, since I cannot understand how any spouse can ever, under any circumstances, forgive even the most casual infidelity. To me, it would be grounds for immediate divorce, but evidently many people find the condition of marriage so deeply satisfying-- they NEED it so much-- that they are willing to put up with anything in order to keep the marriage intact, in no matter how sadly altered a form. Fleming helps the reader understand the thinking of those marriage-needers, and for this reader, that was no small achievement.