Two Marriages

by Phillip Lopate

Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads

Celebrated essayist Phillip Lopate proves himself a master of the short novel form in this inspired pairing of novellas portraying two less-than-perfect unions.The Stoic's Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Well-off, idle Gordon, a lifelong student of philosophy who has always had a stunted capacity for happiness, first meets the enchanting Rita when she comes to his home as a nurse's aid sent to care for his dying mother. The attraction is instant and a marriage proposal ensues. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he's adopted as his substitute religion. When Rita's cousin from the Philippines arrives one Christmas, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon's stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test.

Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends.It is Saturday morning, and Frank and Eleanor are planning the dinner they will host to celebrate the visit of a famous actor friend. These preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank's son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.

Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Reviews

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me he quedado igual. No he entendido muy bien el punto al que quiere llegar, me ha dejado fría e indiferente. No es desagradable ni mucho menos, se lee bien pero cuál es el punto??

[laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

no me ha cambiado la vida pero me ha gustado lo realista de la narrativa.

[Heather Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the lit contest I'm judging, this is the second book I didn't throw away. (The first was The Drop Edge of Yonder. There are two unrelated stories in this book, one much longer than the other. The first story is called The Stoic's Marriage. Okay, the guy's a scholar of Stoicism. But it's more than that, it his creed and he lives by it. Except for when he'd rather be reading than listening, walking away than staying. Except for when the Epicurean peaks out and says "I'd like that." Maybe the worst thing for a Stoic is when he gets what he wants.

This story's hilarious. Not hilarious during the reading of -- in fact, for a great long time I was terribly nervous that Gordo (not much of a stoical name) was going to turn into a Johannes of Kierkegaard ilk. Not to worry there. More like what would happen if Buddha were to fall have his love requited with a sexy serving girl. I laughed out loud a the end, then told my boys all about it.

Both of these stories would make provocative reading material for book clubs. Watch out: who's the narcissist in your marriage?

[Junita · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is closer to a 3.5. The first novella is fairly slow-going, but really picks up speed near the end, which carried me right into the second, much more readable, novella. There are lots of rich character studies here, which I quite enjoyed, but no real story unless you consider the ongoing trials of marriage one.

[karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book annoyed me! The man was such a ass that I wanted to kill him! Call me and I will tell you about it so you don't have to read it!

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

First novella is amazing; from the first sentence I thought, "oh no" and the dread didn't let up until the last. The second marriage is a yawn, nothing new or interesting or insightful.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is this a joke? It feels like a joke I'm not getting.

[Sebastian Camacho Millan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Novela que relata la apacible vida de Eleanor y Frank, un matrimonio de mediana edad que aparentemente llevan una vida equilibrada y sin sobresaltos.
Ambos, como lo indica el título en su segundo matrimonio -el que conforman-.
Basta una pequeña reunión entre amigos para mostrar las grietas de lo aparente, el matrimonio tiene una crisis que va aumentando de manera exponencial pero discreta.
Las novelas que relatan las relaciones de pareja son una de las que más me atrae para serles sincero, y Lopate logra un buen trabajo con su narrativa.
Novela breve pero intensa.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una pareja, ambos en su segundo matrimonio, disfrutan de los placeres de una vida acomodada: buenos vinos, finas charlas, amistades selectas … creen estar protegidos ante los embates de los círculos sociales que frecuentan. Sin embargo, una discusión que va de menos a más nos descubrirá las profundas raíces psicológicas de los malestares que aún los aquejan.
Diálogos sobrios pero bien logrados dan forma a esta breve pero sustanciosa narración.

[Marina Bartolomé · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me ha sorprendido para bien. He conectado mucho con algunas partes. Hay reflexiones interesantes. Se parece bastante a un relato de Carver que leí hace unos días, la historia al menos. Las conversaciones en algún momento me parecen un poco artificiales.

[Ray Hubley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sheer pleasure -- a master of prose at work,

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conservar ?? No sé.

[Jonathan Alvarez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me quedo con los diálogos bien logrados de Lopate. Qué manera de marcar personalidades a través de la oralidad. Se nota que sabe lo que hace.

[Becky Wolsk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the first novella much more than the second. The first was a cautionary tale with a real plot, the second was like a story in the New Yorker.

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, what fun this was to read. This book is comprised of two very short novels about - you guessed it - marriage. They are completed unrelated to one another. The first involves a wealthy, single man who falls in love with the young immigrant nurse who cares for his mother in the last few months of the mother's life. He and the nurse quickly marry, and shortly thereafter he learns a whole lot about her he did not take the time to learn before their marriage. His slow but steady undoing by this woman is completely horrifying, but also so entertaining. The second story is about a second marriage between an upper-middle class white couple living in Brooklyn. They seem to have a very nice life, and you would think they would have learned something from the failure of their first marriages, but one night after a large, fun, dinner party thrown at their beautiful brownstone, it all falls apart. Really interesting character development in both stories and like i said, really entertaining stuff.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

These two dryly comic novellas are gems of precision and wit. In the first, Gordon, a chubby, middle-aged, financially comfortable academic with a history of abortive romantic relationships, is stunned and euphoric when the beautiful, compliant Rita responds to his tentative advances. Overwhelmed with gratitude that this perfect creature seems to be as smitten with him as he is with her, Gordon describes the idyllic early days of their marriage while the reader waits for the inevitable shoes to start dropping. When they do, Gordon accepts mounting indignities as his life crumbles and a friend asks the obvious question: “What did you expect?”

The second story describes a day and a night in the lives of Frank and Eleanor, second-marriage urban sophisticates in brownstone Brooklyn, as they prepare for and host a dinner party and attempt to deal with the revelation of betrayal in their relationship. When the aggrieved partner puts the odds of staying vs. leaving at 50-50, you know you’re in the hands of a sharp-eyed satirist of modern urban life.

[Elyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Philip Lopate's essays, so I decided to try this fiction book. He is a better essayist than novelist, but that just means these novellas are merely good rather than great. I enjoyed the first novella more than the second, though the first was full of dramatic twists and turns that sometimes seemed outrageous. It was a suspenseful story and the characters were well developed. The second novella had an interesting premise, but I felt it needed more detail and character development. Overall, Two Marriages is worth checking out, especially for Lopate fans.

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was given this book as a gift and found it disappointing. The first novella, "The Stoic's Marriage," is about a lonely man's marriage to a younger Filipino woman who was his dying mother's nurse. Her portrayal struck me as cliched and insulting. A better book on a similar subject is "The Sugar Mother" by Elizabeth Jolley. The second novel consisted almost entirely of dialogue between a mature couple on their second marriage...it was like a philosophical dialogue passing itself off as fiction.

There are a lot of better books out there!

[MaryAlice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked these 2 novellas a ton. First, they are a great set - each story reflecting and enriching the other in surprising ways. Second, they were funny, not in a laugh-out-loud way, but in a manners/parlor kind of way. Though not everyone in our book club liked the book, most agreed that we had one of our best discussions ever about it.

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was very intelligently written, but not all intelligent books are always enjoyed. I found myself wanting to get through this book quickly because the characters were so frustrating. While reading I held myself back from screaming “Get a spine”. I ended up skipping in and out of chapters and the novellas just didn’t hold my attention.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always loved Lopate's nonfiction; these novellas (especially the first) are well worth the read. You want to shake the guy in the first novella till he drops, at the same time, as, well, I could see how it could happen.

[Robin Malcomson · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was interesting in an "I should be interested in this book and keep reading it because the writer is an intellectual and smart people read books like this" kind of way. I didn't really enjoy it and ended up skimming a lot of it, but I get that it was a "well written" book.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are two novellas about two very different marriages. I liked the second story better as it seemed to build more logically from the initial premise. I found the first story fantastical and therefore harder for me to follow.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engaging study, 2 novellas, juxtaposed. It pulled me in and would not release me until it had its way.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was on oprah's summer reading list.. I like the first novella better than the second one...it was rathr crazy.

[Amrita · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first one was slow moving initially but got very interesting and picked up speed later. Read the 2nd one with the same expectation as 1st but it was no where close.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two very different stories in this book. A fast, entertaining read and skillful writing. The first story is wild and unrealistic; the second is scary realistic.

[Mrs C · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first story paints Filipinos as unscrupulous folks. It was not enjoyable to read but it was well-written.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn't get even 50 pages into it. Hated the whiny main (only) character :(

[Molly Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sale purchase. Fast, weird, woody Allen-ish, entertaining enough. A little too much "making love" and a little emotionally bleak.