This short novel, subtitled We think we know the ones we love, is set in Kentucky and California, first in the forties and fifties, and finally towards the end of the twentieth century.

Andrew Sean Greer movingly evokes the world of Childress, a small farming community, where Pearlie falls in love with Holland Cook. She meets him again on a California beach and declares that she will take care of the dejected ex-soldier. They marry despite his aunts’ warning.

The arrival of a stranger shatters Pearlie’s contented world. The story now moves backwards and forwards, through two wars with conscientious objection and draft dodging as a theme.

Reactions to the execution of Ethel Rosenberg run parallel to the story and we are immersed in the mindset of the US in the post war period. We experience the US from the position of a black, second-class citizen in the fifties. Most of all, we see what it was like to be sexually different.

The end of The Story of a Marriage comes quickly and effectively when Pearlie is with the survivors of the story at the end of the century. Greer shows us, very effectively, how everything has changed.

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