The Story of a Marriage-Andrew Sean Greer

The Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
Farrar Straus Giroux, Apr 2008, $22.00
ISBN: 9780374108663

Pearlie met Holland twice as strangers. The first time back home in Kentucky when he showed up to walk with her to school and could look the tall Pearlie eye to eye. Later after a Mr. Pinker persuaded Pearlie to come to California for employment writing letters to GIs fighting the Axis powers, they re-met on a Pacific beach. The second time around led to marriage although Holland is not quite the same health wise as he was before the war and has a child Sonny afflicted with polio.

In 1953 San Francisco, a stranger to Pearlie but Holland’s former lover and boss Buzz Drumer arrives. At a time when the Americans are fighting another war on an Asian peninsular while the fear of communism permeates very segment of life, he makes a strange offer of $100,000. Holland wants to accept the terms while Pearlie is afraid. Her fears stem from the realization that her husband remains a stranger with his dark secrets as the appearance of Mr. Drumer proves.

Told by a continuingly stunned Pearlie, the surprising yet plausible disclosures seem to keep coming throughout this poignant historical novel that affirms regardless of relationships everyone has a part of them that remains a stranger to their significant other. The triangle that forms between the shocked Pearlie, the secretive Holland, and the stranger-not stranger Mr. Drumer make for a fabulous look at the early 1950s in which Andrew Sean Greer asserts that the “Happy Days” nostalgic innocence claimed by modern revisionists is untrue. The author subtly explores young health issues, post traumatic distress syndrome of returning veterans, racism, sexism, and being politically correct during the “I Like Ike” era.

Harriet Klausner