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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli , a love story full of secrets and astonishments set in 1950s San Francisco "We think we know the ones we love." So Pearlie Cook begins her indirect and devastating exploration of the mystery at the heart of every relationship, how we can ever truly know another person. It is 1953 and Pearlie, a dutiful housewife, finds herself living in the Sunset district of San Francisco, caring not only for her husband's fragile health but also for her son, who is afflicted with polio. Then, one Saturday morning, a stranger appears on her doorstep and everything changes. All the certainties by which Pearlie has lived are thrown into doubt. Does she know her husband at all? And what does the stranger want in return for his offer of $100,000? For six months in 1953, young Pearlie Cook struggles to understand the world around her, most especially her husband, Holland. Pearlie's story is a meditation not only on love but also on the effects of war--with one war just over and another one in Korea coming to a close. Set in a climate of fear and repression--political, sexual, and racial-- The Story of a Marriage portrays three people trapped by the confines of their era, and the desperate measures they are prepared to take to escape it. Lyrical and surprising, The Story of a Marriage looks back at a period that we tend to misremember as one of innocence and simplicity. Like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier , Andrew Sean Greer's novel is a narrative tour de force that confirms him as "one of the most talented writers around" (Michael Chabon).
Author Notes
Andrew Sean Greer was born in Washington, D.C. on November 5, 1970. He received a bachelor's degree from Brown University and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Montana. His collections of stories, How It Was for Me, was published in 2000. His novels include The Path of Minor Planets, The Story of a Marriage, and The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. The Confessions of Max Tivoli received the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award for an author under 35 and Less received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As he demonstrated in the imaginative The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Greer can spin a touching narrative based on an intriguing premise. Even a diligent reader will be surprised by the revelations twisting through this novel and will probably turn back to the beginning pages to find the oblique hints hidden in Greer's crystalline prose. In San Francisco in 1953, narrator Pearlie relates the circumstances of her marriage to Holland Cook, her childhood sweetheart. Pearlie's sacrifices for Holland begin when they are teenagers and continue when the two reunite a few years later, marry and have an adored son. The reappearance in Holland's life of his former boss and lover, Buzz Drumer, propels them into a triangular relationship of agonizing decisions. Greer expertly uses his setting as historical and cultural counterpoint to a story that hinges on racial and sexual issues and a climate of fear and repression. Though some readers may find it overly sentimental, this is a sensitive exploration of the secrets hidden even in intimate relationships, a poignant account of people helpless in the throes of passion and an affirmation of the strength of the human spirit. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
San Francisco in the 1950s may have seemed like a simpler time, but for African American wife and mother Pearlie Cook, it is anything but. Settled in the city's Sunset District with her African American husband, Holland, she is wholly unprepared for the news imparted by a stranger who appears one Saturday morning at her door. He is Charles Buzz Drumer, a handsome white man who shared a room with Holland in a military hospital during World War II. (Holland had seen battle, Buzz had not. He was a conscientious objector, or, Pearlie wonders, was he just a coward?) Buzz's astonishing admission (nope not telling) and the request that follows rattle Pearlie's peaceful world. She must make a heartbreaking decision, not only for herself, but for her polio-stricken son. Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004) sets this emotionally wrenching tale in a U.S. rife with strife recovering from one war, mired in yet another, and grappling daily with the prickly issue of race. A haunting, thought-provoking novel about the liabilities of love.--Block, Allison Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"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. It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not only about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as fiction we have written and believed." 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 (known as the "Outside Lands") that sits 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!" But Holland is the first and only love of Pearlie's life; they met when they were teenagers in a farming community in Kentucky. World War II uprooted them and brought them, by varying pathways - he as a sailor, she as a war worker - to San Francisco. In the Kentucky years, Pearlie had fallen for Holland "like a field on fire," and when they meet again her feelings are unchanged. She ignores the aunts' warning. The reader of "The Story of a Marriage" may have an increasing sense of foreboding, but 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. Holland and Pearlie care for their young son in tender unison. The aunts remain in their lives; in fact, they appear to be the family's only visitors. The Cooks live in a strange sort of isolation, and the reader isn't sure why. Yet Holland and Pearlie seem content to have little or no connection to the neighbors in the pastel-colored veterans' houses going up all around them. 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 recently ended 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 tranquility 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. This caller, Buzz Drumer, will insinuate himself into the family's carefully managed existence, calling into question all of 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, looking ever younger as he matures inwardly. 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. (One of its rides is even called "Limbo.") 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, fittingly enough, its plot is firmly anchored in the vividly described America of the early 1950s - a seemingly serene era whose submerged social, racial and political tensions would soon create their own disruptions and upheavals. Maggie Scarf is the author of "Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage" and the forthcoming "September Songs: The Bonus Years of Marriage."
Guardian Review
In 1953, the year in which Andrew Sean Greer's third novel is mostly set, Pearlie Cook, Greer's narrator, and her husband, Holland, are living in San Francisco with their infant son. Like many other young couples in their fogbound neighbourhood, the Cooks served their country in the recent war; Holland was a soldier in the Pacific theatre, while Pearlie - along with "only a few other girls from a community like mine" - left their small southern hometown to do auxiliary work for the navy. Yet the postwar world doesn't seem filled with promise to them. Relations with their neighbours are oddly guarded. People stare at them in restaurants, and when Pearlie has lunch with Holland's elderly twin cousins, they eat "in a special area of a department-store lunchroom, after being turned away by two others". One day, a golden-haired stranger shows up and politely removes his hat. "I wasn't," Pearlie writes, "very used to men like him removing their hats in my presence." Unspoken prohibitions are also at work in their household. Holland, a dark, strikingly attractive man whose job at a fittings company often keeps him away from home, needs a calming environment. Husband and wife sleep in separate bedrooms. Their telephone has a muted ring, and Pearlie has even managed to find them a dog that doesn't bark. She has arranged all this because, before their marriage, which took place when they were reunited by chance after the war, Holland's cousins warned her that he suffers from "bad blood, a crooked heart". There isn't, it seems, a cure for this condition. "Don't let him out of your sight," the cousins added: he shouldn't need "to go downtown, or worry over the past". At this point, one of them got worked up and shouted: "Don't do it! Don't marry him!" But Pearlie decided that "I hadn't heard right . . . it was so absurd, so crazed". Into this set-up comes the golden-haired stranger, who introduces himself to Pearlie as Buzz, a friend of Holland's from the war years. And almost immediately, Greer fills in some of the yawning blanks that give his opening section the artificial, slightly tinny resonance of a narrative laying the groundwork for a series of twists. Pearlie is a reader of Ford Madox Ford. Will Holland turn out to be a compulsive adulterer along the lines of Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier ? Not quite. Buzz reveals to Pearlie that he's Holland's former lover. The two of them met in hospital during the war. Holland left him when Pearlie reappeared on the scene, but now Buzz wants him back. If Pearlie will agree to step aside, Buzz will give her his considerable fortune. She says she'll think it over: in those days, she writes, there were limited options "for coloured girls like me". This moment of putative revelation - Pearlie's first direct acknowledgment that the Cooks are African-American - fits neatly into the novel's general scheme. Again and again, as the ensuing story plays out, Greer toys with the reader's presumed preconceptions as his characters make reliably mistaken surmises about one another. One of the preconceptions that's central to his theme is the idea that the American 1950s were sunnily innocent years, an idea with great purchase on the conservative imagination. For Pearlie, the pressing facts about 1953 are the Korean war, the pre-civil rights racial dispensation, the fears of nuclear war, the execution of the Rosenbergs and the persecution of homosexuals. Against this backdrop, her interest in silences, misunderstandings and people's many-sidedness acquires a historical dimension: for her and the other characters, many things can't be openly said. Pearlie has a taste for aphoristic musings. "We think we know the ones we love," she writes. "But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know." These quasi-Proustian observations and their associated metaphors are brought to a state of high polish. But Greer's plotting doesn't always live up to Pearlie's commentary. A side-story involving a spirited white girl who's secretly engaged to a prejudiced soda-jerk is tacked on to the main plot in a way that's both implausible and underexplained. Pearlie's sympathy for Buzz blooms remarkably quickly, and there's an excess of busily symbolic detail. If the characters watch a movie, overhear a TV show or read the words printed on a paper bag, what they come across will be eerily reflective of their predicament. Most of all, Greer's first big narrative bombshell doesn't detonate with the force that he seems to be hoping for. After all the wary looks from white neighbours, references to the status of the "coloured" population, mentions of Pearlie's "community" and descriptions of visits to segregated lunchrooms, only very inattentive readers will be startled to learn that the Cooks are black; some might even wonder why Pearlie has tried to play such a heavy-handed trick. The surprises in what follows are managed more skilfully, and Greer has clearly done his homework on the time he's depicting. But the artificial, slightly tinny resonance never goes away. To order The Story of a Marriage for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-tayler.1 Unspoken prohibitions are also at work in their household. Holland, a dark, strikingly attractive man whose job at a fittings company often keeps him away from home, needs a calming environment. Husband and wife sleep in separate bedrooms. Their telephone has a muted ring, and [Pearlie Cook] has even managed to find them a dog that doesn't bark. She has arranged all this because, before their marriage, which took place when they were reunited by chance after the war, Holland's cousins warned her that he suffers from "bad blood, a crooked heart". There isn't, it seems, a cure for this condition. "Don't let him out of your sight," the cousins added: he shouldn't need "to go downtown, or worry over the past". At this point, one of them got worked up and shouted: "Don't do it! Don't marry him!" But Pearlie decided that "I hadn't heard right . . . it was so absurd, so crazed". - Christopher Tayler.
Kirkus Review
World War II shapes and complicates a young married couple's shared and separate lives in this latest from California author Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004, etc.). What narrator Pearlie Cook says of her introverted spouse Holland ("We think we know the ones we love.") applies also to herself, in one of several surprise twists taken by Greer's slowly unfolding plot. We learn early on that she met shy, handsome neighbor Holland Cook in grade school in their native Kentucky. After Holland enlisted and went overseas, Pearlie moved to California, where she volunteered for a military organization, then married the wounded returning soldier (further burdened by congenital illness), devoted herself to creating a peaceful, loving environment and bore him a son (who would be stricken with poliomyelitis). Her family's story becomes entangled with that of "Buzz" Drumer, Holland's hospital roommate, whose disclosures overturn everything Pearlie thought she knew, and confirm her determination to protect her husband and son--though, she'll eventually acknowledge, she has managed instead "to step on and alter a war, and a marriage, and the course of several lives." Greer creates numerous moving moments, but they're often obscured by emotionally charged figurative language and imperfectly dramatized expressions of enlightened social and political attitudes. (If only George Orwell had edited this book...) Little more can be said without revealing the novel's crucial surprises--except that the author simply tries too hard, and the reader balks at its surplus of sentimentality. Greer's best feature as a novelist is his willingness to keep trying new things. Let's hope his next book avoids the worst excesses of this one. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It's 1953, and as Pearl struggles to care for her ailing husband and son, a stranger offers her $100,000. What's up? With a national tour and reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpt We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them--we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare as it turns white to brown, then drop it, satisfied, into the cup. I watched my own husband do that every morning; I was a vigilant wife. We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can. We have seen it all. But what have we really understood? One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body in the bed: a new kind of stranger. For me, it came in 1953. That was when I stood in my house and saw a creature merely bewitched with my husband's face. Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it. That is how I think of it. That I must look at everything around it, all the hidden stories, the unseen parts, so that somewhere in the middle--turning like a dark star--it will reveal itself at last. The story of how I met my husband; even that's not simple. We met twice: once in our Kentucky hometown, and once on a beach in San Francisco. It was a joke for our whole marriage, that we were strangers twice. I was a teenager when I fell in love with Holland Cook. We grew up in the same farming community, where there were plenty of boys to love--at that age I was like those Amazonian frogs, bright green, oozing emotion from every pore--but I caught no one's eye. Other girls had boys falling over them, and although I did my hair just like them and ripped the trim off attic dresses and sewed it on my hems, it did no good. My skin began to feel like clothing I had outgrown; I saw myself as tall and gawky; and as no one ever told me I was beautiful--neither my mother nor my disapproving father--I decided that I must be plain. So when a boy came along who actually met my eyes, who showed up along my walk from school and got himself invited in for a slice of bread, I didn't know what to make of him. I could tell he wanted something. For some reason I thought it was help on his schoolwork, so I always went to great pains to hide my notebooks and not sit next to him in class; I wouldn't be used like a crib sheet. But of course that wasn't what he wanted; he was always good in school. He never said what he wanted, in fact, not in all the years I knew him, but you do not judge a man by what he says. You judge him by what he does, and one clear bright night in May when we walked by the strawberry patch, he held my hand all the way to Childress. That's all it took, just the briefest touch, in those days when I wore my nerves outside my skin like lace. Of course I lost my heart. I was there with Holland in World War Two. He loved that I "talked like a book" and not like any of the other girls, and when the time finally came for him to go into the army, I watched him step onto that bus and head to war. It was a lonely grief for a young girl. It never occurred to me that I could leave as well, not until a government man walked up to our house and asked for me by name. I tromped down in my faded sundress to find a very ruddy and clean-shaven man wearing a lapel pin of the Statue of Liberty in gold; I coveted it terribly. His name was Mr. Pinker. He was the kind of man you were supposed to obey. He talked to me about jobs in California, how industries wanted strong women like me. His words--they were rips in a curtain, revealing a vista to a world I had never imagined before: airplanes, California; it was like agreeing to travel to another planet. After I thanked the man, he said, "Well then, as thanks you can do a favor for me." To my young mind, it seemed like nothing special at all. "Now that sounds like the first bright idea you ever had," my father said when I mentioned leaving. I can't find any memory in which he held my gaze as long as he did that day. I packed my bags and never saw Kentucky again. On the bus ride to California, I studied the mountains' ascent into a line of clouds and saw where, as if set upon those clouds, even higher mountains loomed. I had never seen a sight like that in all my life. It was as if the world had been enchanted all along and no one told me. As for the favor the man asked of me, it was perfectly simple: he just wanted me to write letters. About the girls around me in the shipyard and the planes and conversations I overheard, everyday rituals: what we ate, what I wore, what I saw. I laughed to think what good it would do him. Now I can only laugh at myself--the government must have been looking for suspicious activities, but he didn't tell me that. He told me to pretend I was keeping a diary. I did my duty; I did it even when I left my first job to become a WAVE--only a few other girls from a community like mine--spreading Noxzema on our pimply faces, the girls' rears shaking to the radio, getting used to Coke instead of rationed coffee and Chinese food instead of hamburgers. I sat there every night and tried to write it all down, but I found my own life lacking; it hardly seemed worth telling. Like so many people, I was deaf to my own stories. So I made them up. My life wasn't interesting to me, but I'd read books that were, and that is what I put down, with details stolen from Flaubert and Ford and Ferber, intrigues and sorrows and brief colorful joys: a beautiful work of fiction for my country held together with silence and lies. That is, it turns out, what holds a country together. I did my job well, in the handwriting my mother had taught me, tall and loyal and true, signed with the special slipknot P for Pearlie I invented at the age of nine, mailed to Mr. William Pinker, 62 Holly Street, Washington, D.C. What did you do in the war, Grandma? I lied to my country, pretending to tattle on friends. I'm sure I was just one of thousands; I'm sure it was a clearinghouse for lonely hearts like me. Imagine the ad jingle: "Be a finker . . . for Mr. Pinker!" Then the war ended, as did the factory work for women and our jobs as WAVEs. I had long since stopped writing my notes to Washington; there was so much else to worry about and I had my position doing piecework sewing to pay for meals. And one day, alone down by the ocean, I walked right by a sailor on a bench, sitting with his book facedown like a fig leaf on his lap, staring out to sea. I knew very little about men, so I was startled to see such despair on his square handsome face. I knew him. The boy who'd held my hand all the way to Childress, whose heart I had, at least briefly, possessed. Holland Cook. I said hello. "Well hi there, Sarah, how's the dog?" he said amiably. The wind stopped, as if, like Holland, it did not recognize me. Sarah was not my name. We stayed there for a moment in the oyster-colored air, with his smile slowly sagging, my hand holding the flap of my coat to my throat, my bright kerchief tugging in the wind, and a sickness building in my stomach. I could have moved on; merely walked away so he would never know who I was. Just some strange girl fading into the fog. But instead I said my name. Then you recognized me, didn't you, Holland? Your childhood sweetheart. Pearlie who'd read poetry to you, who'd taken piano lessons from your mother; that was the second time we met. A sudden memory of home, opening like a pop-up book. He chatted with me, he even made me laugh a little, and when I said I had no escort to the movies that Friday and asked if he would come, he paused a while before looking at me, saying quietly, "All right." I was shocked when he turned up at my rooming house. The low-watt bulbs revealed a weary man, hat in his hands, his skin a little ashen, his elegant necktie loosely knotted. He claimed, years later, that he couldn't even remember what he or I wore that night: "Was it the green dress?" No, Holland; it was black roses on white; its pattern is framed and hung in my memory alongside our honeymoon wallpaper (pale green garlands). I thought he might be drunk; I was afraid he might collapse, but he smiled and offered his arm and after the film took me to a nice restaurant out in North Beach. At dinner, he hardly ate or spoke. He barely looked at me, or noticed the stares we got from other patrons; his own gaze was fixed on two cast-iron dogs that sat before the unlit fireplace. So after we had taken the streetcar to my corner, and it was time to say good night, I was surprised when he turned very quickly and kissed me on the mouth. An electric jolt of happiness passed through me. He stepped back, breathing quickly and buttoned his jacket to go. "I have to see a friend," he told me sharply. "Holland," I said. He looked back at me as if I had jerked a string. "Holland," I repeated. He waited. And then I said the right thing. It was the only time I ever did: "Let me take care of you." His deep eyes awakened. Did he think I meant to remind him of our time back in Kentucky, that I offered the soft threat of the past? A dark line appeared between his eyebrows. He said, "You don't know me, not really." I told him that didn't matter, but what I meant was that he was wrong; I knew him, of course I knew all about him from that time in our constricting little hometown: the grass behind the schoolyard we used to poke with a stick, the path from Franklin to Childress cluttered with witch hazel and touch-me-nots and railroad vine, the ice shivering in a summer pitcher of his mother's lemonade--the lost world that only I remembered. For here we were so far from home. The one we could never regain. Who could know him better than I? I acted instinctively. All I wanted was to keep him there on the shining streetcar tracks. "Let me take care of you again." "You serious?" he asked. "You know, Holland, I've never been kissed by any boy but you." "That ain't true, it's been years, Pearlie. So much has changed." "I haven't changed." Immediately he took my shoulder and pressed his lips to mine. Two months later, by those same cable-car tracks, he whispered: "Pearlie, I need you to marry me." He told me that I didn't really know his life, and of course he was right. Yet I married him. He was too beautiful a man to lose and I loved him. Excerpted from The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer. Copyright (c) 2008 by Andrew Sean Greer. Published in April 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpted from The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
