Invitation to the Married Life
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
The married couples in this book have two things in common: a skill in the duplicity that flourishes even in happy marriages, and an invitation to the Farthingoes' ball.
In the months preceding the party, we learn something of their double lives: the faces that each one exposes to their spouses and to the world give little hint of their complex and secret tribulations. By the time they arrive at the ball, each clutching his or her different hopes and fears, we have become familiar with their unsmooth paths, and shared many a humorous escapade or private tragedy with Rachel and Thomas, Mary and Bill, Ursula and Martin, Frances and Toby, as well as the alluring R. Cotterman and the only questing bachelor, Ralph.
Sophisticated, sympathetic, witty and razor-sharp in its observations of the sub-text of married life, this is a wonderfully accomplished and enjoyable novel which develops totally out of the characters it creates.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the tradition of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way, Huth's novel invites us we are invited to a lavish party and the preparations for it in and around Oxford, England. The ball itself--a hilariously overwrought affair thrown by Frances and Toby Farthingoe--serves as the grand finale to a series of variations on the theme of marriage. By the time the music dies away, we know a handful of the participants, their dreams and their frustrations. Thomas Arkwright, one of the more tormented characters, speaks for all of them when he says that ``sometimes a man finds himself at a crossroads''; even Ursula and Mary, two of the happier women, struggle for balance and endure anxiety. With considerable skill (aside from a few awkward flashbacks), Huth ( Nowhere Girl ; Virginia Fly Is Drowning ) has choreographed an elaborate dance of sorts for nearly a dozen characters--young and old, loyal and adulterous. She conveys physical gestures (``indignant shoulders hunched up, spiky fingers riffling through peanuts as if they were worry beads'') as cannily as she captures the emotional complexities of intimacy and desire. She has fun while she's at it, and so will the reader.
