A Sea Change

It is J. R. Salamanca's special gift to create in his novels a world of feeling---in The Lost Country, a pastoral world; in Lilith, a world of fever and dementia; here, a romantic and loving world corrupted by the death of desire.

The story of a marriage is told. Michael, still young, looks back---to his passionate courtship of his wife, Margaret, in Washington after the war.; to the ecstatic beginning of their life together (one flesh, one sensibility, one name even: "Mickey" to each other); to almost blind consummation of his first adultery (with a girl whose animality is in contrast to the Ariel-like fineness he worships in his wife); and finally to an exquisite nightmare summer and the French Mediterranean resort to which he has brought his wife in a desperate attempt to recover what is lost.

There, in a lovely coastal town dedicated to pleasure, he falls in with an attractive and worldly society that provides the instruments of catastrophe---the catastrophe toward which his life with Margaret has been spiraling. There is an actress, a fascinating and totally honest woman, with whom he has a violent affair; and there is a young Italian gigolo---at once simple and frighteningly shrewd---who furnishes the unconsciously sought –after coup de grâce to the fading idyll of Michael and Margaret.

A Sea Change is about the havoc wrought in marriage by the ebbing of desire, about the impossibility of willing oneself to love---and the ways in which, attempting the impossible, men drift into cruelties of which they would have believed themselves incapable. It is the richest and most ambitious work of a greatly gifted novelist.