Product Description

It is 1953, and America is still haunted by the war. Pearlie and Holland live quietly with their son in San Francisco, with a barkless dog in a vine-covered house. Apart from Holland's elderly aunts, the family have no regular visitors. That is until one day, a neat and elegantly dressed gentleman named Buzz appears at their door. "The Story of a Marriage" portrays three people trapped by the restrictions of their era, and reveals how we can never truly know the ones we love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51412 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Khaled Hosseini
`A beautiful and moving tale of war, sacrifice, race and motherhood.'

Amy Tan
'This is an exquisite story with shattering realizations about love.'

About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer was born in Washington, DC, the son of two scientists. He studied writing at Brown University and received his MFA from the University of Montana. He soon moved to San Francisco and began to publish in magazines such as Esquire, The Paris Review and The New Yorker before releasing a collection of his stories, How It Was for Me. His first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, was published to much acclaim in 2001, and his second book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004 is an American bestseller. He lives in San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

Evocative and beautufully written
This is an extraordinary book in many ways. The main thread is the unfolding story of an unusual marriage as remembered by the wife many years later. The author is neither the age, gender nor race of the narrator yet one believes that this is the voice of the wife. He evokes America in the 1950s with great clarity interweaving all sorts of interesting vignettes from events of the time. The story of the marriage emerges slowly, but there are surprises on the way that keeps one wanting to find out what happens next. The writing is a pleasure to read as it flows gracefully and excites the imagination with sparkling descriptions and deft use of similes. Recommended

Sleeping Duty
A lean, satisfying feast following a summer of bloated novels, Greer's new novel--his third--gives us the story of Pearlie Cook, reluctant adulteress in 1950s America. Hysteria and menace are everywhere, as all-pervasive as the cloying San Francisco fog. This is the McCarthy era: a time when a housewife's silence is a sign of guilt for having 'brought about the Korean War, the rise of communism, the death of so many of our soldiers, and perhaps the end of the world.' From chronicling such pressured times, Greer's prose achieves the compression of poetry. Like those of Elizabeth Bowen, his aphorisms beg to be committed to memory, like bullet-point guides to understanding life better: 'I knew silence, which like an exotic poison--odourless, tasteless--brings a subtle madness to the victim.' Or: 'Health is only enjoyed in the blithe ignorance that you will lose it. In that way it is like youth'. And: 'Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it is unendurable alone.' If the pace slackens in the fifth part, and if the public & private worlds don't always fuse with total success, we have Greer's taut prose and piercing insights to compensate.

quite good
I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book as much as i did. it's a slim novel and so quick to read, yet it leaves you thinking for some time about the nature of marriage, love and relationships, as well as the the war and how it affects life, even years after.