A Happy Marriage: A Novel

A perfect novel. The structure was so unusual, alternating chapters about how he (from the flyleaf, it appears nearly all of it is true) and his wife met and their early courtship, with those about her dying process. The story of the early years gradually creeps up in time to meet the end, and by the end both stories alternate in the same chapter. Honest, incredibly moving and sad, and unbelievably beautiful writing.

The story is Enrique's, and, evidently, Rafael Yglesias's. Enrique's wife Margaret is dying of cancer, and the novel is structured to jump back and forth in time between her final weeks of life and other times, stretching backwards 30 years, during which they met, fell in love, and struggled. Yglesias writes with a sharp and unsparing insight into insecure Enrique, into himself, laying bare his immature and unfaithful love of youth and then later in time, contrastingly, the depth of love and devotion to Margaret that he recognizes as the essential truth of his life, and the profound pain, guilt, and bereavement he feels at losing her. Enrique and Margaret are both brought fully and wonderfully to life, characters created with all the show more authenticity seemingly transferred whole and without loss from their real-life models.

Essentially this a novel of loss, and so can be bleak. Straightaway Yglesias writes that "His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red- and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail." (page 24... sure you want to keep reading?!). Enrique is a harsh self-critic who fears he cannot provide what is needed for Margaret and for their two young adult sons. "He dreaded the sorrow that lay ahead for his sons and feared he would be unable to console them. He soothed himself with the hope that a permanent deposit of those carefree hours playing on the hardwood floors with their mother - not a memory of happiness but an unremembered absorption of her joy at having created them - could provide a lifetime's buoyancy that would eventually lift his sons' hearts above the cruelty of losing her."

Alternating paragraphs that deal with the present with paragraphs that recount the past, in which Margaret and Enrique are young and full of life and in which death is an unconsidered far-off reality, balances the couple's ending with its beginning and provides moments of welcome amusement, as Yglesias pokes fun at his extraordinarily insecure, but with a patina of bravado, younger self. There is a yearlong affair Enrique has with a friend of Margaret's during an early portion of their marriage, a time during which he professed to feel like the marriage was a huge mistake, and that he did not love his wife and felt he never would. If there is anything murky in this novel, it is how he moved from those feelings to the deep and unmistakable love he clearly feels for her 20 years on. show less

In this autobiographical novel, Yglesias explores a happy, if far from perfect, marriage primarily through the eyes of the husband, Enrique Sabas, as he faces his wife Margaret’s death. The novel opens with the 21-year-old Enrique being introduced to the two-or-three-years-older Margaret through a mutual friend, Bernard. Enrique is smitten, but knows this lovely creature is out of his league. He’s a high-school dropout; she studied at Cornell. The fact that he has already published two or three novels and lives on the money he’s earned as a writer does nothing to calm his fears and self-doubt. Bernard was right when he refused to introduce them before: Margaret is way out of Enrique’s league. The next chapter flies forward show more thirty years to his wife’s hospital bed, where Enrique watches Margaret in a drug-induced sleep while he ponders how he will get the courage to negotiate the terms of her death, fighting against doctors, her parents, and friends, to grant this woman he loves one final wish – to die at home.

The novel alternates with each chapter between the final two weeks of Margaret’s life and the early days of their courtship and marriage. It’s a testament to Yglesias’s skill as a writer that the reader (obviously already knowing the marriage will happen and last) is just as anxious as Enrique that Margaret like him, feels his nervousness as he dallies so as not to arrive too early to dinner, worries whether his own failings and mistakes will cause irreparable harm to their relationship. There were times I wanted to throttle him; there were times I wanted to console him. And Margaret is not without faults, though I think Yglesias allowed Enrique to dwell on her faults too much. A word of warning to the reader who is squeamish: Yglesias writes with brutal honesty about the horrors and indignities of a major illness. The final chapter hurls the reader back and forth between Margaret’s final moments and the beginnings of their relationship. I was moved to tears, at the same time my heart swelled with love and joy. show less

Moving and almost uncomfortably intimate fictionalized account of the author's marriage, viewed through the lens of her death from cancer. The chapters alternating between the beginning of Enrique's relationship with Helen to the days leading up to her death work well. Some issues are left unresolved (how did Enrique manage to stay with his wife after coming so close to ending the marriage during his affair with one of her friends?), and at times the narrators swings from self-centeredness to self-flagellation gets a bit tiresome. But it is astonishing that Yglesias puts both himself and his marriage out there, warts and all, for everyone to see. Every moment of the book is achingly real and unsettlingly true.

I would give this book 5 stars alone just on technical merit, emotional attachment, style, you name it. But the subject matter is SO HARD. If it hadn't been for Book Club, I would have never picked this up.
But I'm glad I did. And I'd like to read something ele by Yglesias, hopefully to balance this out.

So... to actually review this...

The story is of a marriage, and is told from the early days when they met, and the last days, when the wife, Margaret, is dying. It is interesting to observe through Enrique the maturation of love, the devotion they have to each other, body and soul, how that changes yet never really leaves. There are moments of passion, when they think they can do nothing but go forward with this love, and moments of show more decision, when they have to choose to commit and re-commit. There are so many moments of illumination, when you see what love comes down to for all of us: how simple are our needs, and yet how complicated meeting those needs becomes, until we look back and see the gifts we were given all along.

There is regret, of course. The story is told through Enrique, so we're not sure what Margaret might regret. And there is the torture of realizing there's not enough time to say it all, let alone do it all: even in a 29-year marriage, with partners who are blessed enough to be able to spend the last months by each other's sides, there still isn't enough time.

If you're up for the challenge, this is a great book. But you will be moved to tears, probably every chapter. show less

If reading about dying bothers you, don't pick it up. If reading about insecure people bothers you, don't pick it up. If you want to read a good story about how a husband prepares himself and his family for his wife's death, and flashbacks to other times in their relationship, then you'll probably enjoy this story. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. There are parts I thought were very slow and boring and frustrating. There were other parts that moved along quickly and were interesting. And there were parts that just made you want to curl up and cry.

This is a beautiful book, both intimate and universal in its scope. The story of Enrique and Margaret's life together travels from lust to anger to contentment. It encompasses all of the elements of a long, full life: work, friendship, family dynamics, and ultimately death. Yglesias gives us a detailed picture of one man and his relationship with his wife, his parents, and his children, but through this specific portrait we are given windows into pain and pleasure that is universal. Like Joan Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking" the stark image of death in Yglesias' novel is both hard to take, and hard to look away from. The level of detail can feel overwhelming at times, but it all works together to portray a realistic and complete show more life. Knowing that this fiction is based on Ygesias' own life gives it added power.
While reading I thought about my relationship with my parents, my father's death, my friends, and especially my fiancee. I'll be passing this book on to my mother, my sister, and my fiancee, but I will make sure to get it back - it has a place in my permanent collection. show less