Tying the not

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARRIAGE Greer meditates on the ambiguity of relationships.

Photograph: Henry Dombey/Facecollective

In Andrew Sean Greer’s best-selling novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, a man pursues the same woman his entire life, but each time they meet she doesn’t recognize him due to a strange condition—he ages in reverse. In Greer’s latest book, The Story of a Marriage, he continues the theme of lovers as strangers, though with a less fantastical premise. Set in San Francisco’s Sunset District in 1953, the novel focuses on a young woman who discovers a disturbing secret about her husband, one that threatens the family’s safety and makes her wonder if she ever knew him at all. It opens with the vaguely ominous line, “We think we know the ones we love.”

Speaking from his home in San Francisco, Greer, 37, says he didn’t consciously plan The Story of a Marriage, his fourth work of fiction, as a continuation of Max Tivoli’s themes. In fact, he didn’t connect with this insight until relatively late in the process. “After writing the book for a year, I had everything in place, but it didn’t make sense,” he says. “I had to figure out why I chose for my characters to do the things they did, and the main choice I made was to understand the ambiguity and deep never-knowing of a marriage.” The story is told with such clear-eyed grace, it’s hard to imagine that the author ever struggled with its meaning. But this is the beautiful con of good literature—making it look easy.

The book begins with the narrator, Pearlie Cook, knowing that something is wrong with her husband but mistakenly believing it’s a heart condition. Determined to be a good wife, she vigilantly keeps their life quiet and stress-free, outfitting the house with a doorbell that hums and a dog that doesn’t bark. She also censors her husband’s newspaper, cutting out upsetting stories about husbands killing their wives, racial prejudice and arrests of gay men.

Like the unfortunate souls in these news reports, the novel’s main characters are all—for reasons the novel only later reveals—outcasts at a time when conformity was cherished. In 1953, the Korean War was ending, the Rosenbergs were executed, and the McCarthy trials were at their height. Pearlie is particularly fascinated with Ethel Rosenberg—the bad mother who orphaned her children, the excellent wife who remained faithful to her husband until death. “Pearlie fell for her struggle,” says Greer. “It’s still baffling why the country executed her, and why she stood by her husband. At the time, it was very shameful to women that she would make that choice, but Pearlie can almost understand.”

To research, Greer read hundreds of issues of The San Francisco Chronicle from the late ’40s and early ’50s, mining them for everything from war dispatches to fashion ads. “The surprise of reading those newspapers was that the headlines would say WORLD ENDS TOMORROW! and then SALE TUESDAY!,” he says. “It was full-on panic and full-on hope in equal-size font—just like today.”

Though cumbersome, the process enabled Greer to see a side of the 1950s that history has mostly forgotten. News reports about widely despised war protestors and conscientious objectors provided the inspiration for the character Buzz Drummer, the man who brings Pearlie the life-altering news about her husband. “Most people know that there was a dark side to the ’50s, but what interested me was that there was a dark side to the Korean War,” Greer says, touching on one of the book’s many themes: draft dodging. “I had never heard stories of people refusing to fight. They were completely outside the American community.”

Interviewing people who lived through the era provided a different insight: Not only do we sometimes get our lovers wrong, we also misread our pasts. In the early 1950s, people were still smarting from two wars, still hoarding rationed commodities like butter and cooking with beet sugar. But when Greer spoke to his mother and other people in their sixties about that time, they remembered the pop clichés like Elvis and poodle skirts, even though Presley didn’t become a sensation until slightly later. The author thinks this makes sense. “If you ask me about the 1970s, I’d say Kiss, decal shirts. I’d miss what was going on because I was a kid. People would say the ’50s was a time of innocence, and I’d say, ‘That’s because you were a child. It was your time of innocence.’ ”

The Story of a Marriage is firmly rooted in its period, but the author also infuses the novel with a deep understanding about the fallibility of memory and perception, themes that make it seem timeless. Like most people, these characters have blind spots, and Greer portrays them with stunning focus.

The Story of a Marriage (FSG, $22) is out Apr 29. Greer reads Apr 24, 2008.