The Story of a Marriage

I don't think I've ever used the phrase "achingly beautiful" to describe anything.  However, I just finished Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage and when I was trying to come up with a succinct description, "achingly beautiful" just wouldn't go away.  So there it is: I have now used the phrase "achingly beautiful" to describe a book.  Are you curious about the book that prompted it?

It begins with the statement, "We think we know the ones we love," and then proceeds to tell the story of  Pearlie Cook, an African-American woman living in San Francisco in 1953, and Holland, her husband.  It is the story of the many ways in which they loved, but did not know, each other.  His aunts had warned her not to marry him; they said he had a bad heart, an illness that could not be cured.  She began to understand what his aunts had meant only years later when she met Buzz, a man he knew from his hospitalization at the end of World War II.  Pearlie, Holland, and Buzz all seem to live in fear of losing love, and fear of not being loved enough.  Greer's strength is in not making this tension over-the-top; there's a lovely subtlety and simplicity throughout.  As the book proceeds to what seems its inevitable conclusion, Greer reminds the reader that nothing is inevitable in love.