What a sucker punch of a novel. Joyce Carol Oats said the prose had subtle irony. Maybe I missed that. Certainly there's a wry self observation. But it's a double bildungsroman, first of the young man failing in love, then of the middle aged man repairing and recreating a deep powerful marriage, so a wry note is inevitable. Overall I wasn't reading this book for the technique and I don't care as much about it as about the fact that this is a big emotional story that works through the compilation of thousands of ordinary details. Yglesias has the art of turning a collection of mundane details from ordinary lives into a book that can make you cry.
A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias
A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias
A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias
What a sucker punch of a novel. Joyce Carol Oats said the prose had subtle irony. Maybe I missed that. Certainly there's a wry self observation. But it's a double bildungsroman, first of the young man failing in love, then of the middle aged man repairing and recreating a deep powerful marriage, so a wry note is inevitable. Overall I wasn't reading this book for the technique and I don't care as much about it as about the fact that this is a big emotional story that works through the compilation of thousands of ordinary details. Yglesias has the art of turning a collection of mundane details from ordinary lives into a book that can make you cry.