"WE THINK WE KNOW THE ONES we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreak nonetheless." So observes plain, devoted, innocent Pearlie Cook, the narrator of Andrew Sean Greer's wondrously unsettling new novel and
the wife of Holland Cook, a man whose physical beauty creates a force field of strong passions all around him.
The year is 1953, and the young Cooks reside in the Sunset district of San Francisco, an undesirable area on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, shrouded in mist and fog. The small house they live in is owned by two "aunts" of Holland's – elderly twin cousins who have grown to love him and have adopted him as their nephew. Strangely, though, just after Pearlie's engagement, they take her out to lunch and say things about Holland that she considers crazy. They tell her he's "real ill", that he has "bad blood, a crooked heart". "Don't do it!" one of them tells the startled Pearlie. "Don't marry him!"
Holland and Pearlie met as teenagers in Kentucky, when she fell for him "like a field on fire". The Second World War uprooted them and brought them, by varying pathways – he as a sailor, she as a war worker – to San Francisco. When they meet again her feelings are unchanged – he remains the one and only love of her life. She therefore ignores the aunts' warning.
Although the reader may have an increasing sense of foreboding, Pearlie's young family lives – at least in her telling – in a state of harmony so profound that even when her only child develops polio there is no sense of a calamity that cannot be managed. The aunts remain in their lives; in fact, they appear to be the family's only visitors.
Pearlie devotes herself to maintaining a protective bubble around Holland, having understood the aunts' talk of a "crooked heart" in its literal sense. She believes her husband has a genetic malformation and is also keenly aware of his sufferings during the war. A seaman on a ship that went down in the Pacific, he spent a horrifying night adrift on the ocean, surrounded by a burning oil slick. In the aftermath of this experience, he needs her ever watchful care. Pearlie has managed to acquire a phone that purrs, but doesn't ring; she has found a breed of barkless dog; she censors the newspapers by cutting out upsetting articles. She has even given birth to a quiet baby: Sonny is so silent she thinks of him as an "antidote" to Holland's fragility.
Yet we know it can be only a matter of time before the tranquillity of this self-contained world is disturbed. One afternoon, four years after Pearlie and Holland's marriage, the bell sounds at her front door. Pearlie opens it to find a stranger on the other side, Buzz Drumer, who will insinuate himself into the family's carefully managed existence, calling into question all Pearlie's certainties. Will her marriage survive in the aftermath?
Andrew Sean Greer's much-praised previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, was an eerie "memoir" of someone born with the appearance of an old, wrinkled man who then ages backward. John Updike found the book "enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov". Greer's new novel is equally praiseworthy, but the influence it evokes is less that of Proust or Nabokov than of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Story of a Marriage is pervaded by a brooding, secretive air. Pearlie, it becomes clear, is a withholding narrator; she has her own silences. Greer's rich prose is filled with Poe-like symbols (there's even a sinister bird) as well as sudden, terrifying illuminations and semi-surreal encounters, many of which take place in a hellish amusement park. Like the envied, threatened lovers in Poe's poem Annabel Lee, Holland and Pearlie live in a windswept "kingdom by the sea".
A timeless story of conflicting loyalties, The Story of a Marriage has roots in the fiction of Poe's era, but its plot is firmly anchored in the vividly described America of the early 1950s – a seemingly serene time whose submerged social, racial and political tensions would soon create their own disruptions and upheavals.
The full article contains 729 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
