Scenes from a heartless marriage

FICTION:IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, one of those old afternoon movies, featuring stilted actors who specialise in long, meaningful glances. The type of movie in which the characters converse in dialogue - "I have a rendezvous with life . . ." - wordy statements that no living human would attempt for fear of bursting into hysterical laughter, writes Eileen Battersby.

The females have wet lips and wetter eyes, the male lead is invariably world weary and slightly wry, not entirely trustworthy but appealing. In the background, a heavy-handed gluey score with a hint of ebbing tides insistently reiterates the agony of undying love as experienced in difficult circumstances.

US writer Andrew Sean Greer's intensely irritating, chill third novel is very like one of those movies, tied up with statements such as "The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?". It is so coy, so mannered, so arid and so self-regarding that relief, not satisfaction, best describes the sensation experienced when, and if, one arrives at the final sentence.

"We think we know the ones we love," is Greer's central thesis and something of a refrain as he returns to this observation throughout. "We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know," announces the narrator Pearlie Cook, one of the most unconvincing narrators yet encountered in fiction. Pearlie sets out to tell the story of her marriage to Holland, a shadowy charmer with a secret.

The fact that Greer never succeeds in making this secret even remotely interesting is only one of the many problems dogging this dull, pretentious tale that strives for profundity yet meanders along saying very little. It is difficult to engage with Pearlie, while Holland is so thinly sketched one is left wondering how anyone could possibly be drawn to him.

Admittedly the story is slight. A woman recalls life with a husband whom she realises she never really knew. Greer never allows the reader to even think of sympathising with Pearlie, probably because she never sounds like a grief-stricken wife. Instead she invariably expresses herself in the manner of a professional novelist, writing for posterity. There is no humour, and even less real emotion. Pearlie sounds as if she stands before a mirror, rehearsing her thoughts. "One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body on the bed: a new kind of stranger. For me, it came in 1953. That was when I stood in my house and saw a creature merely bewitched with my husband's face."

She is looking back to the world of the 1950s and in this, Greer has worked at evoking a sense of period. When not musing about her husband's mysterious emotional life, she is considering the plight of Ethel Rosenberg, whom she refers to as "the Jewish wife convicted of helping her husband hand nuclear secrets to the Soviets. In speckled trial photographs, her face seemed hard as a porcelain doll's, her body stiff with anger, dressed in the outdated hat and cloth coat of a poor woman. It was difficult to think of her as a mother . . ." But nothing about this book convinces, because it never becomes more than a performance piece.

IT IS SET against the background of war. Pearlie and Holland knew each other as children back in Kentucky. When they meet up again as adults in California, he has been to war and she has been earning her living by making stories designed to satisfy the authorities. It is the era of paranoia and witch-hunts and draft dodgers. Pearlie knows that to be Holland's wife is to tend him, protect him from reality. She removes unpleasant reports from the newspapers, she finds a dog that doesn't bark, a door bell with a subtle tone. The couple have a son who contracts polio - very much in keeping with every mother's fear in the 1950s. It is also the era of air-raid shelters and drills. Into their sanitised post-war, uneasy home arrives Buzz, Holland's former lover. He and Pearlie enter long negotiations - a trade, Holland for Buzz's property.

With The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004) Greer demonstrated his poise and sophistication, his engagement with the cerebral. Max is a man born old - as he ages, he becomes physically younger. It is a dandy's book ; bizarre, nightmarish, cruel and intellectually daring. It is a novel that looks closely to Nabokov. It has genuine languor. Yes, it is cold, but it is impressively precise.

The Story of a Marriage is almost vague by comparison and cannot even summon that languor. It is an attempt to look at the 1950s era through the eyes of a housewife, a black woman who is aware of people staring at her as she meets the white male, Buzz, for their discussions. In ways, the marriage at the epicentre of this book - and epicentre is the correct word as this cold, deliberate narrative has no heart - is irrelevant.

Pearlie makes speeches, she stands on a soapbox confronting great issues, she declaims: "How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them."

Throughout the narrative, Holland's elderly aunts offer their two cents worth. Pearlie's marriage is like a play, will he leave or will he stay? Who cares? The book jacket compares Greer's novel with Ford Maddox Ford's classic The Good Soldier (1915). Why? There are no ironies, no ambiguities, none of the inspired haphazardness that render Ford's tale so masterful. For one brief moment, when the narrator realises that yes she is now old, Greer makes Pearlie live. Otherwise, The Story of a Marriage fails through its calculation, its pretence and ultimately its lack of purpose, because Pearlie's unconvincing intellectualising of her life and times never amounts to more than a sterile, lifeless exercise in writing words on a page.

Instead of reading a book that gives nothing, why not read The Good Soldier? It may well be the type of novel Greer is attempting to write but he has fallen far short of his ambitions.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Story of a Marriage, By Andrew Sean Greer, Faber, 195pp, £12.99