The Marriage Hearse
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
At 5 P.M. on a snowy night, Maurice Locksley, sometime literary stud, stops off at a Boston pub and there, with a glass of beer, launches a 10 1/2 hour journey into the riskier regions of the heart. First he’s off to dinner with his wife and 4-year-old son . . . then on to an evening in the suburbs, where his ex-wife and teenage children wait . . . and then back to town for a post midnight tryst with Maggie, his exuberant young mistress. Maurice, at forty, is poised on the brink of adventures yet untaken, but where he wanders may put him at risk, caught between the rock and hard places of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The narrator of this engaging first novel is Maurice Locksley, a Boston intellectual and writer. At 40, Maurice is vaguely dissatisfiedeverything has come too easily to him. In 1966, to avoid being drafted, he married and fathered a child, then divorced. Remarried to a lovely poet, he currently divides his time among the three women in his life: his wife, ex-wife and new mistress, an artist whom he met at his son's daycare center. Maurice, for whom self-analysis is akin to breathing, is now faced with midlife crisis. Should he leave his wife, whom he loves, for the excitement and intensity of a younger woman who makes no demands on him? The protagonist is by turns so cocky, so self-deprecating and so funny that it is impossible not to like him. Duberstein has created a hilariously accurate portrait of a certain kind of counterculture existence. Since this is the first of a projected three-novel cycle, readers should become acquainted with Maurice right away.
