If you're looking for a short, atmospheric novel to read this summer, I recommend Andrew Greer's latest book, "The Story of a Marriage," which recounts the story of one family's domestic crisis in post-WWII California, 1953.
Greer's tale, which follows the lives of the Cook family (Pearl, Holland, and their young toddler, Sonny) as they settle into the newly developed Sunset district of San Francisco, contains several well-placed surprises that I won't give away here. In the course of the story, the author makes it abundantly clear that the 1950's appear "golden" only if they are viewed through the rosy lens of selective memory. If you enjoyed membership in a favored class -- white, politically orthodox, and heterosexual -- the decade had its high points. Otherwise, not so much.
Greer weaves the darker threads of the 50's -- polio outbreaks, communist witch hunts, the Korean War, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation -- into his story with language that is evocative, yet understated. He is at his best when he addresses societal restrictions that suppressed personal freedom and dignity. Pearl and Holland live in a world where elegant grandmothers in their Sunday hats, eager to celebrate a special occasion, must request directions to the "special area" of the tea room reserved for blacks. Gay men are rounded up in private club raids and imprisoned for criminal indecency. Interracial couples must assess when and where they can be seen in public without risking physical injury. Conscientious objectors and draft dodgers are run out of their hometowns and forced to relocate in order to reclaim any semblance of a normal life. Next door neighbors spy on each other and suppress their political opinions. Unhappy wives and husbands consider clandestine murder as a preferable alternative to the public shame of a divorce. A repressed blanket of desperation smothers Pearl and Holland's suburban neighborhood as thoroughly as the fog that rolls in from San Francisco Bay each morning.
As indicated by the book's title, Pearl and Holland's marriage crisis forms the crux of the novel. Pearl, Holland, and some integral third parties are all casting about for some measure of freedom, some unfettered definition of their own personhood, throughout the book. Although the novel is written in Pearl's voice, I think that Greer's depiction of Holland's internal struggle offers the more subtle and deep exploration of human nature. Holland is portrayed as a handsome man -- the stunning kind of "handsome" that necessarily affects every aspect of his existence. It is his gift, and his curse. Greer writes (in Pearl's voice): "By being what everyone wanted him to be -- being the husband, the flirt, the beautiful object, and the lover -- by pleasing us all in giving us his gracious smile, he had tortured each of us when it did not turn our way. Beauty is forgiven everything except its absence from our lives, and the effort to return all loves at once must have broken him."
Other characters in the novel seem to have some idea of who they want to be and how they want to escape the box that the mid-20th century has constructed around them. Holland, on the other hand, has lost all sense of himself after years of existing as no more than a mirror image of other people's desires. Everyone has attempted to employ his beauty and use it to actualize their own "dream narrative." He has been a chameleon for so long that he is hard pressed to know his own heart's desire, and the choice he eventually makes may surprise you.
This is a good book on many levels -- I recommend it.
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