The Slippage A Novel

Part VII



THE LAUNCH PARTY





Six months later, a lifetime, William’s car was in the shop, and he was driving Louisa’s car home from Tom’s book party, and Louisa was saying how surprised she was that Tom had gotten back together with Annika, and wasn’t it strange that he didn’t look happier, and William was murmuring vaguely, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, careful not to reveal what he knew about the situation, which was that Tom and Jesse had quickly settled on a wedding date, and just as quickly fallen to fighting, and that a bitter month had ended with her decision to leave him for good, and that she was now pregnant by another man upstate. Instead, William said that Annika looked as though she had aged five years in the year since she and Tom had last been together, and that was when Louisa put both her hands on the dashboard in front of her in a gesture of conspicuous steadying and told William that, during a particularly bad stretch in the spring and summer, she had been sleeping with a man who worked at her office.

They were on Loomis Street, near Harrow, only blocks from the empty lot where their new house would have been. There was a pond to their left and a small park to their right. The windows were down because the temperature was mild, and crickets called out through the perfect night.

William turned into the park’s paved lot. There was one other car there, an old VW Beetle with two teenage girls in it, smoking. A third girl was in the back seat; William glimpsed a strip of bare shoulder. He pulled past the Bug and into an empty space at the far end of the lot.

“So,” he said. The word was like a hole in the air.

Things had been going well since the house burned down, more smoothly than William had any reason to expect. He had celebrated a birthday, and then Louisa had, and in both cases they had taken quiet dinners at new restaurants downtown and talked frankly about how, despite all that had happened, they were lucky. William had found work at a large bank, a job that was a natural continuation of what he had done at Hollister. He described investment opportunities and nudged customers toward those that seemed to best suit their needs. His new boss saw him as a quick study, was always saying so, had already moved William into a bigger office and after only six months had already given him a substantial bonus. Louisa’s boss, the museum’s top administrator, had retired for health reasons, and the board had asked Louisa if she would consider taking the position on an acting basis, and she had, and though they were still negotiating whether they could come to permanent terms, Louisa felt that even if it all fell apart she’d be assured of a position at least that good at another museum. They had buried the dog in their yard, in the corner near the little girls who liked to sing, and they had stood on the deck afterward, afraid to sit for fear that might make it seem more real, and he had folded her against his chest.

The park light over them, a metal drop at the top of a metal stalk, blinked erratically. William sat for a minute with the engine going, pushed the pads on the seat down with his hands. In his rearview mirror he saw the Beetle pulling out of the lot. The radio was on the same station it had been on that afternoon, but the program had changed from talk to music, gentle jazz whose effect, paradoxically, was to make the anger rising in him even hotter and sharper. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

Louisa had made her admission matter-of-factly, responding, William figured, to some internal train of thought: maybe something Gloria Fitch had said about errant spouses, meaning Graham Kenner, who had been drummed out of the house when Cassandra had discovered him with Helen Hull; or maybe she was thinking about the cover of Tom’s book, Graph Zeppelin, and how it had a line that sloped diagonally downward and ended in a fiery crash; or perhaps she was simply observing how Tom put his arm around Annika like he was keeping his distance from her and lamenting the way that unhappiness could bloom between people like a black flower. She hadn’t taken a deep breath before speaking, or told William he should brace himself, or done anything at all in prelude or preparation. She had just clicked the clasp of her purse closed and then open and put her hands flat on the dash and told him the news. As the light flickered above, she elaborated slightly: the man was a lawyer working for the museum on a lawsuit brought by a woman whose son had been injured when part of an exhibit had fallen on him. The man had come by the office, which seemed entirely necessary given the case. Louisa thought nothing of it until he invited her to coffee. They had flirted for six months or so. “This was a while ago,” she said. “Last spring.”

“Before I went to the trade show?”

She squinted. “I had met him, yes. It wasn’t why I sent you to Chicago, though when you were gone the thought did occur to me. Nothing happened then, though. Then he went away on another job and I didn’t see him for a while, and then one day he came by for lunch, and one thing led to another.” William asked where; Louisa said a motel. “It happened one time after that,” she said. “Two total. That was all. He didn’t keep after me to continue, and I was relieved because I wasn’t interested at all. At some point I felt that I had never been so uninterested in anything in my whole life.”

William rolled down the window. It was colder outside now, which seemed to focus the noises of the night. William put his hand down on the fabric of the seat and started to make a fist. At first it was purely theatrical; he wanted Louisa to see his hand clenching and unclenching. But the more he did it, the more he thought maybe it was accurately reflecting what he felt inside: the anger, the confusion, the need to hold tight to something certain. He believed he should speak, and probably with a question. She had told him who, and how long. Should he ask why?

He must have, because Louisa turned toward him, her expression now opened up. Silence slowly closed it. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles and laughed, or made a noise close to it—not nervous, he didn’t think, but more in the fashion of a tipsy wife. “Well,” she finally said. “Are there ever real reasons?” This question didn’t seem rhetorical, and so William started to answer her, but he managed only a few words before she interrupted him. “I wasn’t running toward him, not for a second. I was running away from my life.” Again, William started to speak, and again, she interrupted. “Maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. I needed to know that I existed. Was I even casting a shadow? John was a nice man, but weak.” She cocked her head to one side. “In fact, I think you met him once. In the mall.” William did not remember. “An older guy, kind of gaunt.” William thought suddenly of long, bony hands, which he did his best not to picture sliding up his wife’s leg, or worse. “Before him, I wasn’t sleeping well for a while, and then I wasn’t sleeping at all. I started to drink more than I wanted. Remember the mail? I was afraid I might vanish and I started setting it aside as proof that there was something only I knew. This was just a version of that.”

A light shone in the rearview mirror. It was a car coming into the lot, the kind of full-size station wagon William didn’t see much anymore. It lurched heavily into a parking spot a few spaces down from William and Louisa, and three teenagers piled out noisily. The girl walked around to the hood, looking angry, and leaned against it. Two boys followed her at a delay; one seemed to be pleading with her, the other mocking her, both slightly, and as William watched he wasn’t sure he didn’t have it reversed, because she seemed to be receptive to the one who was mocking and dismissive of the one who was pleading. Both boys produced cigarettes and started to smoke them, or were they joints? The car radio was on too loud, playing a song William had loved when he was their age. Louisa noticed it too. “It’s like we’re watching a time machine,” she said.

“Which one am I?” William said.

Louisa did not answer. Something in William’s tone held her silent. And then William was silent again, also, and the girl put her arms around the neck of the mocking boy and then hooked a finger through one of the belt loops of the pleading boy and then took his cigarette from him and flicked it an impressive distance across the parking lot. It went like a shooting star through the darkness and sent off a shower of sparks when it landed. Then the mocking boy got back into the car and changed the radio and the girl started to kiss the pleading boy and the pleading boy clasped his hands at the lower part of her back and the two of them went at an angle against the edge of the hood.

“Is this for our benefit?” Louisa said.

“Doesn’t seem so,” William said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just needed my strength back. Do you know what that feels like? I was doing it for us, in a strange way, for you and me. I wanted to be better. For the first time in years, I felt like we were building toward something.”

“We sure were.”

She winced, her face childlike and mournful. “I didn’t mean the house.”

“I know what you didn’t mean,” William said, and turned the key to start the engine. But before he backed the car out of the space, he lifted his right hand, as if he were indicating the height of something or someone, and then brought the flat of his palm down as hard as he could on the top of the steering wheel. It juddered and for a second he thought he had broken something.

“Jesus,” Louisa said.

“I hate this car,” he said. He said it like the assault was purposeful. But the act had surprised him, and when he went to back up he bumped the lower half of the wheel and the horn honked, once, for a fraction of a second at most. The girl and the pleading boy turned toward them and turned away just as quickly and that’s when William thought he recognized her: she looked like the cashier at the Red Barn, the daughter of the owner. But then she stared defiantly at William and Louisa as if she could see them, though he didn’t think she could, and this time she didn’t look like that girl at all, and William backed out and left the parking lot. The boy in the car shouted something at them, and William waved good-bye with his hand, which was beginning to hurt.

Louisa started to speak a few times. She asked him if she’d made a mistake by saying anything. She told him that it had been less than nothing. She reassured him that she was happy with how things were, now that all the trouble between them had evaporated. William was hardly driving anymore, just resting his left hand on the wheel as they rolled onto their street. The Brookers were hosting a small gathering in warm light and everyone was smiling. The Morgan place looked just like William’s but wasn’t. Stevie and Emma’s house was dark, and was no longer theirs at any rate. They had moved to Arizona, baby in tow, so that Stevie could oversee corporate creative. On the day the moving truck had come to cart their things away, William had walked across the street and given Stevie a handshake and a pat on the back, feeling as though the two of them had shared something, even if he was the only one who knew it. “Hold down the fort,” Stevie had said. William had saluted, just as he had at the garage door, not feeling as idiotic about it this time.

William pulled into the driveway and got out without turning off the car. An orchestra of birds tuned up in the branches overhead. He unlocked the front door and pushed into the house with his shoulder. He heard claws scrabbling on the tile; the dog bounded out of the hall and hit William hip-height. “Good boy,” he said, bending down to scratch the dog’s head. This one was black, with a white streak running down the forehead to the nose, and he slept in a crate in the garage. William went into the bedroom, where he lowered himself onto the bed and looked out to the driveway. Louisa was sitting in the SUV with the door open, illuminated by the interior light, still as a statue.

He closed his eyes and time passed, not very much, maybe, but enough that he began to feel its weight upon him. When he opened his eyes Louisa was out of the car, facing him, just a few feet from the house. She was backlit by the headlights of the car, which meant that she was looking at her own reflection and he was lost behind the glare. He wondered if she could see him at all. She made a spider of her hand and pressed it to the outside of the windowpane. William stood and went to the window. He waved with his sore hand, receiving no acknowledgment in return, and then lowered the hand to hip height, made a spider of his own, paired it with hers, across the glass, and stood there squinting at her silhouette as the light ran away from her in streaks.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




Movies have credits, as do record albums. The contributions of others are recognized explicitly. Books, being strange, operate under the fiction that they’re produced by a single individual. As that individual, it falls to me to recognize the rest of the people who helped this book into being, in ways both large and small, subtle and straightforward, abstract and concrete, willing and somewhat less than willing. I’d like to thank my wife, Gail; my kids, Daniel and Jake; my parents, Richard and Bernadine; my brothers, Aaron and Josh; my friends Lauren and Rhett and Nicole and Charlotte and Nicki and Todd and Harold and Steve; my agents, Jim Rutman and Ira Silverberg; my boss at work, David Remnick; my colleagues at work; and, finally, last and most, my editor, Cal Morgan. I’d also like to thank all married men and women for living rewarding, frustrating, comforting, and disconcerting lives that are frequently in flux and too infrequently in focus.





About the author




A Conversation with Ben Greenman

Where do you live?

In Brooklyn, right near where the spacecraft Barclays Center landed.

And yet, you chose to write about the suburbs. Why?

Well, I grew up in the suburbs, and I think I’m still there in some ways, in my mind. I got conditioned to believe certain things about human interaction, or the lack of it. In the suburbs, distance works differently. There’s more silence (which can be either paralyzing or erotic) and more meaninglessness (which can be either liberating or crushing).

But that’s about the book, and this is about the author. Let me ask you about the relationship between your life and your writing. How do you feel about writing autobiographically?

Generally, I’ve been against it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to look more closely at the kind of life I have, even if that doesn’t exactly mean looking at my own life. As life goes on, it becomes more and more about weighing responsibilities against diminished (or narrowed) freedoms. I have accepted that in my marriage, in fatherhood, in work. But I haven’t explored the same principle in my writing. For a long time, I wrote with a maximum of freedom, meaning trickery and metafictional evasion. I told myself that taking fairly straightforward aim at the lives of my characters was less exciting, though maybe I was just avoiding it because it was less comfortable.

Do you worry about hurting people close to you when you write?

Yes. I know a writer (I won’t say who) who seems to take delight in calling out friends and lovers in his or her fiction. Is that bravery? Is that narcissism? I suppose I am not answering the question so much as asking more questions.

How else have you changed as a person, and how has it changed you as a writer?

When I published my first book, I was just recently married. I had no children. Now I’ve been married more than a decade and I have two children. Somewhere along the way, I crossed an invisible line that made those things more important than books. Or at least more important than what happens to a book once it’s published. At times, I would agonize over every little detail of a book’s publication and reception. Now, it seems like a somewhat arbitrary process that shouldn’t really be overthought, because it’s not purely predictable and not an enjoyable source of speculation.

How do you handle reviews?

At first, I read them all. Now, I try to avoid them all. I know lots of reviewers. I have worked as a reviewer. I respect the profession and think it’s vital to the future of literature that people continue to have conversations about books: what works, what doesn’t, why certain trends intensify while others wane. But I’m not sure it’s vital for the future of authors. More specifically: investing too much in reviews can be fatal for authors.

You have written a wide variety of kinds of books, from a collection of experimental short stories (Superbad) to a novel about a funk-rock star (Please Step Back). Do you have a mental list of other kinds of books you want to write but haven’t yet?

Sure. A political novel, a crime novel, a purely comic novel, a form of scripture, a novel in verse, a single-word novel, a memoir of a word, a travel book about imaginary places.





About the book

Plotting a Point

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I went to see an author read at a bookstore. He was older, though probably not as old as I am now. He was not exactly famous, but he had done good work for years. He was proud of what he had achieved, and rightly so. I sat on an uncomfortable chair with two dozen other youngish people and admired his reading for the clarity of vision, the lack of histrionics, and the evident pleasure he took in his sentences. He was not self-satisfied. He was not foolish. He did not talk about things like advances or sales. He was a good role model for a young writer.

Afterward, the audience asked questions. Two of them have remained with me. The second, I’ll talk about later. The first came from a young woman in the crowd who stood to ask it. She asked the writer why he wrote at all. The audience laughed, but it wasn’t a combative question. I think she just wanted to know why an intelligent person with other options would devote his life to the art of prose, which is often a prescription for obscurity. He thought about it. He scratched his not quite beard. “Well,” he said. “I guess to connect with people.”

At that moment, my heart fell a little bit. I didn’t measure it, but I’d guess a centimeter. It fell because his answer was incomprehensible to me, and it was incomprehensible to me because, up to that point, my own fiction had approached the question from the opposite direction. I wrote not to connect with others, but to prove the impossibility of connecting with others. One of the first stories I had finished was from the perspective of a dog about to get put down in an animal shelter. The dog was uncertain what his life had meant, if anything. The dog had loved the human to whom he had been attached, or thought he had, but his current state cast that entire set of memories into doubt. The dog was exiting life with only slightly more information than he possessed when he entered it, and less certainty that any of that information had value. I’m not sure the story was any good, though it contained at least one nice touch, which was that the dog could express himself, but only within his own head. He was narrating, but not communicating. He had thoughts, but no one understood him, or even heard him.

It is possible that if I had stayed after the reading and approached the author to talk about his answer, he would have reconciled his worldview and mine. He might have said that the impossibility of connecting was exactly what motivated his attempt to connect. We might have been speaking the same language. But I left. I thought I was proving my point by leaving, but maybe I had proven his point by going to the reading in the first place. Maybe I had proven his point by reading at all, his work and the work of others, or by feeling, as I encountered any book, a mix of attraction and repulsion: to the prose, to characters, to an author’s ear for language, to imagery, to plots. Maybe I had proven no one’s point.

The story about the dog was published in a college literary magazine a few years later. The writer from the reading got a little more famous, then a little less famous, then a little more, then a little less. It was and remains an admirable course. A while later, I got a deal with a publishing house. When the first copy of my first book came off the press, I flashed back to that reading, and to that question. Was writing about connecting with people, or about erecting a monument to the fact that connection was impossible? In that first book, and for many years afterward, I answered that question indirectly: aggressively, but indirectly. I wrote high-concept short stories, often comic, that had a certain amount of alienation or ruptured communication baked right into the dough.

Then it came time to write a more traditional novel. “The time has come,” said a voice from on high. It turned out to be my editor. The first thing I did was reject the suggestion out of hand. Instead of taking up a traditional story, or a traditional mode of storytelling, I created a new character who was the enemy of tradition: a conceptual artist who distilled his fears about the way the world (mal)functioned into a series of graphs. His approach, I decided, would be to burlesque any attempt to make sense of the chaos and randomness of the world. Shortly after I thought of him, I started to make graphs on his behalf. One of the first was a recursive commentary on the way comprehension slips away from you even as you reach for it.



That graph made me laugh, once, and then it made me sad. It contains both sadistic and masochistic elements. It has also landed differently in my mind at different times: it has seemed like a superficial paradox but also a profound abyss. A little while later, I was looking at it upside down and thought of a companion graph.



That one was also sad, maybe even sadder. Look at the line: It goes up like something optimistic: a bird on the wing, an answered prayer. But it’s measuring the dishonesty needed to falsify that optimism. I tacked that one up next to the first one and looked at it until the gray line went even grayer, at which point I made another graph about dishonesty.



At around that point, the idea of a novel-length work based on that character fell apart. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. I found myself backing off of the graphs slightly. It wasn’t because my editor and I had talked about a more traditional novel. It was because the graphs were comfortable for me in every way. They were habit. I made dozens of them. And while part of creative work is doing the things that you do well, part is deciding when to disrupt your own habits. In terms of that question from the reading decades ago, the graphs were not a way of connecting with others, or even a way of admitting that connection was impossible. They were a way of forestalling the question by communicating primarily with myself.

I printed out the graphs, set them aside, and moved forward with the novel. It became something different, less a staging ground for conceptual pieces, more a straightforward investigation of marriage, of childlessness, of emotional and sexual infidelity. These were common topics, I knew, because they engirdled the lives of many people I knew.

Then a strange thing happened. A guy I had communicated with a little bit online started posting the graphs on his website, and the graphs began to acquire some measure of popularity. People responded to them. There was, briefly, some talk of making a book of the graphs.

At that point, I knew I had to abandon them, or at least move them farther and farther away from the novel I was creating. I went back to the book. The conceptual artist became a secondary character. His sister and her husband came to the fore, along with those questions about marriage and fidelity and suburban emptiness and disappearing youth. The charts were still over my desk, addressing some of the same questions, but they were no longer presiding over the book. The charts were now a set of ideas that had been abandoned by another set of ideas. What better way to explore loneliness?

So, what is loneliness? It’s everything except for the few things that it is not. Last year in the Guardian, Teju Cole made an excellent list of books about loneliness. He picked works by W. G. Sebald, Ralph Ellison, Lydia Davis, and more. All his selections were good, but they were also primarily books about solitude, books about lives without connections. The deeper I got into this book, the more it seemed to be about the opposite: a highly connected life that was nevertheless lonely. (I started to write “that was full of loneliness,” but it seems strange to say that something is full of loneliness. It’s like saying a room is full of emptiness.) The main character, William, is married, without children. He works at an office with coworkers he sees nearly every day. At some point, he starts sleeping with a woman who is not his wife. Does he ever make a meaningful connection? Is it even possible? (There is a moment in the book where he forges a relationship with a boy, the son of an old friend. Briefly, that nourishes him, but it is short-lived as well.) Some might argue that William does what everyone does: he enjoys a series of temporary connections that, over the course of a life, add up. They would not necessarily be wrong. But I would ask them a follow-up question: Add up to what?

So is that the real question? Is The Slippage an attempt to discover life’s ultimate purpose—or, alternatively, to discover that there isn’t one? That seems grandiose, though it may also be accurate. For most of my own life, I have assumed that the thing that makes life tolerable is meaning, and that the thing that makes meaning is art. Facts are necessary things, but they are just the footholds in the wall you use to climb higher so you can see (or hear) art. And even when you get within reach of art, there’s often not enough of it, or at least not enough of the right kind. I don’t mean to say that you can’t find art you like. That’s not hard to do. But liking is only the beginning. Each and every piece of art, whether a short story or a painting or a pop song, has a specific effect on a certain reader/viewer/listener at a certain time. And art, like medicine, can save or doom. Sometimes the art you like isn’t the art that challenges you. Sometimes the art that challenges you isn’t the art that enlarges you. Sometimes a piece of art grabs you tight but lets you go too soon: disappointment. Sometimes you depend on a piece of art to rescue you and it leaves you cold: more loneliness. If you could locate exactly the right kind of art exactly when you needed it, that would be great. But believing in that kind of efficient delivery requires an implausibly optimistic view of the world and how it operates. How things really work, I think, is that we need to clear away much of what’s created so we can find the things that are meaningful to us. And so, in the novel, I found a role for the chart artist by setting up a subplot in which two forces are locked in battle: art and fire. Both are refining forces, though one is an agent of creation and the other an agent of destruction. At one point, following a rash of arsons in town, the chart artist develops what some might call an unhealthy obsession with fire, and then translates his obsession into artwork:



I liked that graph when I thought of it. It seemed funny without also being mean. I even considered making it the sole graph in the body of the novel, reproduced below a normal old paragraph of prose. Instead, it ended up here. Later, it occurred to me that it (along with many of the other graphs) actually encodes a great deal of anxiety on my part about how artwork is received. This graph, the fire graph, is a metaphor of enthusiasm. It speaks to the odd process by which an audience (of critics, say, or students, or the reading public, whatever that means) does or does not take to a book.

What happens after a book comes out? People read it and have reactions, and some of them express those reactions, in print or online. It’s a perfectly workable process. But it’s also a strange process, reductive and confusing. Earlier, in telling my story about the reading I attended as a young writer, I mentioned that audience members asked two questions that have remained with me. The first, as I have said, was about connection. The second was this: “Is this your best book?” A young man asked that question. I believe he was wearing overalls, which is neither here nor there. The older (but still young) writer tilted his head as if he was thinking. He scratched his not quite beard. His answer was this: “No.” The audience laughed. “What I mean,” he said, “is that I think the best is yet to come.” Once more my heart fell a little, not because I didn’t see the wisdom of the writer’s answer, but because I thought I saw something false flickering at the heart of it. The chances that your next work will always be better than your last are slim indeed. Over the course of a career, work both draws closer to inspiration and moves farther away from it. Believing in steady improvement is an operating fiction. And yet, pride tells you to be more proud of the most recent work than the work that came before it, and to pretend that it is the most completely realized portrait of your inner state. Again, much of this becomes irrelevant if an artist signs up for a lifetime subscription to his or her own artwork. Long fallow periods can be followed by a new flowering. Movements can be profitably lateral instead of aggressively, deceptively vertical.

After I left that reading, I went to a restaurant and did some doodling on a napkin. One of the things I doodled was a graph that later inspired a piece of work by the conceptual artist who did not quite become the center of this book. It seems like an appropriate place to end.





Read on

Author Recommendations

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MARRIAGE: other things, too, but maybe mainly marriage. Here are some other works that also look closely at the idea.

Frederick Barthelme, Second Marriage. Frederick’s brother Donald has a grand literary reputation, deservedly so. Fewer people, maybe, know about Frederick. His novels are more realistic and also more comic, which combine to make people feel that they’re somehow miniatures. They’re not. They see sharply and they say what they see just as sharply.

Frederick Busch, Harry and Catherine. Busch is one of my favorites, for his clear-eyed prose and his devotion to real people. This novel takes place solidly in the real world, with politics and history underlying an adult love story. It’s beautifully written and expansive when it comes to ordinary human emotions.

Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate.” For years, Moore has been putting up good work on this particular plot of land. This story is about illness and compromise and violence and the importance of humor in dissolving all those things, at least temporarily. It also contains a great working definition of marriage: “a fine arrangement generally, except one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates. This, in a way, is the counterweight or countermovement to the Moore story. The people may be specific, but the world they inhabit is very general, satirical in the broad sense. I thought about the Lurie book often as I wrote my own, though they have very little in common. Oh, also, Mick Jagger is in the TV-movie version of the Lurie book.

The Bible. My book is a book about infidelity, at least somewhat, and it raises the question of whether it can be part of a healthy marriage. Statistics say yes. The Bible says no. But what else does the Bible say? Let’s look at Deuteronomy 22: “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” Family values, I guess.

Donald Westlake, Drowned Hopes. Westlake’s the best, and this is one of his best, a heist book with a nearly perfect hopelessness. Why is it also a book about marriage? Because there’s one little subplot involving Bob, a guard at a reservoir, who is thrust into a hastily arranged marriage with his girlfriend, Tiffany. The marriage and its accompanying pressures proceed directly to Bob’s brain and attack it via nervous breakdown. Bob’s story only takes up a few short chapters—they’re central to the plot, but marginal to the main characters—and it functions like the cartoons around the edges of Mad magazine. Still, it’s one of my favorite portraits of American marriage.


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