Seven Books That Explore How Marriage Really Works
In writing, matrimony can prompt questions about freedom, desire, and identity.
Everyone wants to get inside of someone else’s marriage. That’s the appeal behind TV shows such as Couples Therapy and the therapist Esther Perel’s podcast Where Should We Begin?—and The New York Times’ recent report on the separation of former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray. Matrimony, for all its mundanity, carries a mysterious aura: How might it alter the ways two people love? How might it fundamentally change who they are? But I’d argue that these are questions best suited for a novelist’s scrutinizing attention. From the awkward flirtations that portend Darcy and Elizabeth’s eventual union in Pride and Prejudice through Rachel Samstat’s acidic divorce in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and into the present day, novels have, for centuries, deftly prodded the nature of wedlock and its continuing allure.
The sharpest writing on marriage does not always end with crisp resolution—with a wedding, death, or divorce. The seven novels below instead explore the ability of the fragile bubble of a relationship to withstand any number of pressures; they feature characters who try to escape isolation through the institution, and others who find freedom in its restrictions. They position it as, alternately, a social imposition, a site of nurturing love, or a cesspool of disloyalty. And they don’t shy away from considering what it means if the person you’ve promised to love in perpetuity doesn’t merely evolve, but turns into that most stressful of things: a stranger.
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, by Anne Carson
The Beauty of the Husband is a poetic meditation on love, attraction, betrayal, and bitterness. Carson’s narrator has separated from her husband. Both are writers, though the narrator’s spouse, a womanizer and a liar, borrows heavily from her work—he even uses a phrase she has translated from Homer to open a letter he writes to his mistress. He is also, unfortunately, beautiful, and his “beauty convinces,” the narrator tells us. She confesses that she might be seduced by him all over again if he came near enough. But she keeps her distance, even as he routinely sends letters exalting their love. That space allows her to reflect honestly on their years together: “Why did nature give me over to this creature—don’t call it my choice, / I was ventured: / by some pure gravity of existence itself, / conspiracy of being!” she cries. In hindsight, the partnership feels inevitable; she had little control over loving him, but writing this book is a way to regain her autonomy, or so it appears. The Beauty of the Husband offers a vision of an uneven union, where one person’s outsize presence occupies, even consumes, the mind of the other.
Room Temperature, by Nicholson Baker
Baker is best known for his experimental debut novel, The Mezzanine, which takes place largely during a single ride up an escalator. In this, Baker’s second novel, the author brings the same level of detail to a—only slightly—longer stretch of activity: a father feeding his newborn daughter. Giving the baby a bottle constitutes the surface-level action of the novel while the narration acts like a boomerang, flying past and returning to meditations on the narrator's bond with his wife, Patty. Their partnership is generous and kind. They make up quickly after fighting; they playfully tease each other; they comfort each other—such as when the narrator reassures Patty after she’s criticized for her terrible spelling. Baker perfectly captures the intimacy of everyday love. A late chapter in the book detailing the couple’s euphemism for defecating—big jobs—and how the phrase takes its place in their personal lexicon is unexpectedly moving, a testament to how the most mundane parts of a shared life can be the most profound. Room Temperature is a book in which not much happens, and everything happens—a fitting description for an excellent marriage.
Eva’s Man, by Gayl Jones
Eva’s Man opens in the aftermath of a murder. Eva has poisoned her lover, Davis, and, from a psychiatric prison, she shares the story of her life, told as a kaleidoscopic sprint through the various men who have shaped it, with just about anyone who will listen: reporters, guards, her cellmate. The most haunting figure among her former partners is James Hunn, a middle-aged man who married 17-year-old Eva after she completed a six-month sentence for non-fatally stabbing a lover. What he ostensibly offers is support and care for a young woman trying to return to society. But in a short space, Jones captures the intense, condescending cruelty of their time together. Eva flees after two years, yet Hunn casts a shadow over every other partner in her tale; his psychological impact reappears throughout the novel. Jones’s prose, arresting and fractured, mirrors the toll that violence takes on Eva. But most compelling is Jones’s argument about the sheer power of marriage: However brief, it has the power to alter an entire life, for better or for worse.
Darryl, by Jackie Ess
“You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife. But sure, ok, I’m the weird one.” So begins Darryl, the story of Darryl Cook, a 40-something man living in Oregon who loves watching other men have sex with his spouse, Mindy. Unlike other couples from the books on this list, Darryl and Mindy share a bond seemingly defined by its liberation and sense of exploration. But both qualities can be dangerous, Ess suggests, when one partner or the other lacks insight and discretion. Darryl opens as a story about “the lifestyle” of cuckolding but evolves into a tragicomic search for enlightenment. The main character falls under the spell of his sociopathic couples therapist, Clive, whose provocations make Darryl’s marriage and his sense of identity—both of which seemed fine, as long as they weren’t probed too closely—start to come apart. Ess has created a hilarious and smart story that reveals the consequences of pursuing that thing many assume they desire: an intentional and examined life.
A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch
Murdoch is a master of psychological unraveling. In A Severed Head, the well-off wine merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon is on top of the world; he has both a brilliant wife and a charming young lover. But after he returns home from a stay with Georgie, his mistress, his wife, Antonia, informs him that she’s divorcing him for her psychoanalyst, Palmer—they have fallen “very desperately and deeply in love.” Without the familiarity of his marriage, Martin becomes unfamiliar to himself, developing an unhealthy obsession with the therapist’s sister. His union with Antonia proves too strong to collapse beneath the weight of rival affairs: Following a fistfight, Martin wins his wife back—but then, comically, his spurned mistress decides to marry his brother, which of course makes Martin jealous. This isn’t even the final twist: Before the book’s finished, other relationships are exchanged and affairs are revealed. In A Severed Head, Murdoch pits marriage and passion against each other; in the process, both come off as petty and absurd.
The Vegetarian, by Han Kang
Yeong-hye, a “completely unremarkable” woman according to her husband, chooses to give up meat after having a series of violent dreams. She then goes on to discard every piece of it in the house, which her husband takes as an attack on both him and their life together. In a way, it is. Yeong-hye’s vegetarianism underscores a desire to run her own affairs—and her sovereignty is a threat to all the men who attempt to control her life. Shades of her marriage appear elsewhere: Her father finds her vegetarianism offensive to his parenting; her brother-in-law takes advantage of her after she suffers a psychotic break. By the end, Yeong-hye, divorced and admitted to a psychiatric hospital, finds something like freedom by imagining herself as a plant. She gives up eating entirely and briefly escapes the hospital to roam the forest. The Vegetarian’s world is difficult to inhabit, but its surreal vision of matrimony as a fragile and dangerous ecosystem is wholly unique.
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
After Leah, a marine biologist, returns home from a deep-sea expedition gone wrong—her submarine sank to the bottom of the ocean, trapping her and her crew for months—her wife, Miri, must try to make sense of how the event has fundamentally altered their marriage. Though Leah survived the incident, she isn’t the same emotionally or physically. Deeply strange phenomena begin: She vomits sprays of water; her eye bursts and “falls down her face like a yolk escaping a white.” The surreal premise is engaging, but the novel finds its greatest power as a metaphor for how people evolve along with their partners. In the face of these enormous changes, Miri is haunted by flashbacks of their life before Leah’s trauma. Armfield focuses on the smaller losses: the movies they no longer watch, the jokes they no longer share. She mourns the daily intimacies required to create sustainable love, while acknowledging that change is inevitable in any relationship—and that it sometimes creates ruptures that cannot be fixed.
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