The Country of Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

"Anthony Giardina has an exquisite sense of the nuances of gesture and voice, the clamor of things unsaid."  
--The New York Times Book Review

The Country of Marriage is a window into the lives of men as they confront the darkness at the heart of domestic existence. And with this collection of stories, Anthony Giardina takes his place among the finest writers of short fiction in America today. His work has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine and has been showcased alongside the work of such contemporary giants as Tobias Wolff and Robert Stone. He is that rare artist whose stories will endure.

The Country of Marriage shows, with frightening clarity, that the most ordinary lives are fraught with secret dreams and frustrations that can both support and sabotage everyday love. Giardina looks at our relationships--with an eye capable of clinical precision but never devoid of compassion--and gives voice to the emotions that lie unexplored and unexpressed beneath their seemingly placid surface.

In "Days with Cecilia,'' a highly articulate shop teacher reveals by attrition the sexual secret of his marriage. In "The Lake," a young fireman confronts his complicity in the murder of his best friend's wife. And in "The Films of Richard Egan," the aborted career of an almost-was film star finds its echo in a suburban boy's life.

These are emotional landscapes at once familiar and unsettling, with characters who are instantly recognizable but endlessly surprising. Brilliantly observed and masterfully told, The Country of Marriage is an unforgettable montage of lives of dwindling promise, of stubborn hope, of emotional atrophy, and of the courage to take root in the indifferent soil of modern existence.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 12, 1998

About the author

Anthony Giardina is the author of Norumbega Park and White Guys. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and his plays have been widely produced. He is a regular visiting professor at the Michener Center of the University of Texas. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/anthon...

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

2003 notebook: Dagberto Gilb's stories of Mexican-American workmen and drunks in border towns are excellent, but I preferred Anthony Giardina's, which are reflective stories of adultery/cuckoldery in America's backwoods and towns: lovely stuff also, but go deeper...

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and interesting, but the overly consistent theme of couples tethered to each other and their lives without actually loving each other became monotonous.

[John Luiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giardina does an interesting job of getting inside the heads of men who can't effectively communicate what they feel or need to the significant others in their lives, but their interior thoughts over their frustrations with life are beautifully written in passages that border on poetry. Not all the characters are likeable. Many of the characters - such as the narrators of "I Live in Yonville" and "Love, Your Parents" - are self-satisfied to the point of being obnoxious but the stories ultimately lead you to feel compassion for them because Giardina so effectively portrays how deluded all that self-satisfaction has led them to be. Common themes across all the stories are the stifling impact of life in the suburbs, and the compromise it represents from the dream that boys (and in one story, a woman) had for their lives.

The 9 stories in the collection are:

1. I Live In Yonville - 14 pp - A man ruminates, smugly at first but then rather desperately, about the routine-ness of his life as a suburban middle-class husband and father. (The title comes from the fact that the man is proud of himself for having read Flaubert, and he knows his life bears a similarity to Emma Bovary's and Emma lived in Yonville.)

2. Days with Cecilia - 25 pp - An exploration of what can happen to a marriage after the birth of a child, and how a spouse can become totally absorbed in the child and lose interest in sex. But there is an interesting twist on this common predicament. Here it's the husband who lives solely for the baby. He is the primary caregiver, and his wife, the primary breadwinner, is the one who started an affair to get some physical attention.

3. The Lake - 25 pp - A young firefighter is living the life he dreamed about as a kid until his wife experiences a post-partum depression. He begins an affair with the wife of a good friend he has known since high school when the friend and his wife (then girlfriend) were the "star" couple of the school. The affair makes the firefighter envision a new life (represented by swimming up through the surface of a lake in a dream). But all goes wrong when the cuckolded friend learns of his wife's adultery and explodes in a violent range - a scene the firefighter is there to witness.

4. Love, Your Parents - 22 pp-- Another smug, unlikeable narrator, this time a 36-year-old man who brags about not paying child support after he loses his job and his marriage and has to move back in with his parents. An interesting, well-told portrait of a cad.

5. The Cut of His Jib - 23 pp - A dashing young lawyer moves with his family into a suburban neighborhood. The 15-year-old boy who mows his lawn keeps watching him, thinking he stands above the typical men in the neighborhood. But the lawyer gets his comeuppance when he tries to demonstrate he's a different cut of man. His attempt backfires. In the end, the other men can smugly prove he's not only not better, he may even be beneath them.

6. The Secret Life - 40 pp - A man enjoys having an affair not because he doesn't love his wife, but only because he enjoys having a secret life. But the wife has surprises in store of him that may change the whole dynamic of his life.

7. The Challenge of the Poet - 21 pp - A women is living the quintessential "quiet life of desperation" with children and an attentive, but now boring husband. The only spark she has is the poet who travels in their circles for half the year when he's not off at writing conferences or teaching at colleges. But one night the poet will put a challenge to her by forcing her to consider whether she has the courage to make any changes in her comfortable life.

8. The Second Act - 19 pp - A re-imagining of what F. Scott Fitzgerald's life would have been like if he hadn't died at 44 and instead finished the Last Tycoon and brought the now thoroughly immersed in depression Zelda back to live with him. In this future that never happened, Fitzgerald is interestingly trying to create the past he once had, discovering along the way that it's nearly impossible to do so.

9. The Films of Richard Egan - 14 pp - Charts the career of the real-life actor, from the late 1950s to early 1960s who was just on the verge of attaining lead actor status, but who always had events (costarring in a film with Elvis) and circumstances (the youthful audience in the early 60s starting to drive all moviemaking decisions) conspire against him. His career is played against the life of a boy who watches his movies, and ends up wondering if his life will deliver on his dreams or end up being a series of compromises.

[Peter William Warn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A back-cover blurb suggests that Anthony Giardina's powerful prose is as revealing as John Cheever's. It is overstatement only for two of the nine stories collected here.

_____


That an unexamined life is not worth living is something we tell ourselves when we are examining our lives. It helps us to feel we are engaged in something worthwhile, taking stock in a way that is useful and perhaps even admirable. The reassurance comes in handy because it is easy to slip into the kind of navel-gazing that makes us useless to ourselves and tedious to others.

Most of the characters that Anthony Giardina creates in rich, revealing short fictions in The Country of Marriage achieve balance. They examine their lives but they live them also. They get married and have affairs or stay faithful. They find joy in their families and satisfaction in their work, or at least they find enough to help them face their challenges. They apply to their lives what they learn in their reflections. The lights they shine on their circumstances can help readers to illuminate our own circumstances as well.

Almost all of Giardina's characters are men. Most reveal themselves in their own voices. They are perhaps in their middle years and they have defined their lives but they sense that they still have time to redefine. Their words might resonate most with men who also are contemplating opportunities and limitations, but in their cadences are questions and possible answers that can echo in the lives of most readers.

Many of Giardina's creations are happy in a way, but not entirely so. Characteristic is the man at the center of "The Secret Life":

The fact was that something in him had always resisted the separate enclosures of his life as husband, as father, as administrator: in his view, they added up to less than the whole. The missing chink was secretive and had to be sought out.... Some voice inside him emitted disapproval of what he was, what he had become, so that even in the intimacies of his marriage, the one place where he might have expected to be free from it, he was frequently bad-tempered, and harbored private suspicions as to his adequacy as a lover. He kept a part of himself back, and even in the most ardent conjugal embraces it became a difficult thing for him to say, "This is entirely me."

"Days with Cecilia" is about a shop teacher at a private school for boys. He spends more time caring for their infant daughter, Cecilia, than does his wife. He is having an affair. His greatest contentment is in the time he spends with the baby, but he feels somehow ill at ease even around her.

The cruel truth is that perhaps men don't, after all, belong with babies. I've thought this myself, wondered why, if the idea were such a good one, we seem to be the first people in history to have thought of it. And lest you come back with a counter-argument too quickly, let me remind you that we are also the first people in history to have come up with aerosol cans and magazines with titles like Self. The rigors of advanced capitalism force us into odd and twisted postures, and this notion of men as nurturers may be just another one of them.

A boy in "The Cut of His Jib" watches his parents and their friends one summer. He waits for something of the world, something important, to reveal itself. He expects to see it in the actions of a neighbor who seems bigger and more vibrant than his father and the other men.

On his face was that by now familiar, wistful suggestion that what was most dear to him, most essential, existed elsewhere. I was sure he was going to step away, come outside, drive off. Around his body was that slight, subliminal blurring, as in a film, where you know an action is forthcoming, and I understood it was the action I'd been waiting for.

"The Challenge of the Poet" is the only one to feature a female central character, but even her story is shaped by men. Her thoughts are about what she might learn about her marriage from the periodic visits of a friend, a successful poet to whom she might feel more than a friendly attraction. Even after years of seeming happiness with her husband, she feels he is indistinct:

When you are married to a doctor, there is a moment in which he emerges. Those early years were like me walking on the ice and Steve swimming beneath it, so that as I walked, I followed his blurry, moving figure below me. And then, for a little while, we'd each pause and blow against the ice, try to make a hole where we could reach each other. And we would. Then he'd go back down again.


THE TWO STORIES THAT FAIL

Writers take on a formidable challenge when they write fiction about real people, especially well-known ones. Their creations must compete with what he know and what we think we know. Few authors can craft characters more interesting than our knowledge, or our imaginings. Giardina, whose fully fictional creations are compelling, suggests he is not one of the rare writers who can pull it off. His story about F. Scott Fitzgerald is flat and his take on Richard Egan, a movie actor who achieved modest fame in A Summer Place (1959), is unconvincing.

"The Second Act" about Fitzgerald:

Giardina takes liberties with his Fitzgerald. This one, for example, has finished The Last Tycoon. Anyone who knows much about Fitzgerald's life will recognize other fabrications. Those only passingly familiar with Fitzgerald's biography might suspect there are others.

Both sort of readers will wonder why Giardina bothered. The story has Fitzgerald retrieving his wife, Zelda, from an asylum. The couple start a new life that is unrelentingly dull. There is no joy in their efforts and nothing to be learned, either for them or for us.

"The Films of Richard Egan":

The sense that Giardina has taken considerable liberties with Egan's life is inescapable even to those of us who know little about the actor. Giardina has him enjoying the small group of dedicated fans he attracted with his performance in A Summer Place but then regretting that his career did not lead to greater fame. He is annoyed, for example, that his co-star in Love Me Tender (1956) overshadows him. That co-star was Elvis Presley. In Giardina's version of Egan's life, the actor's professional regrets define him.

That presentation rang false and so I learned a little about Egan. A quick on-line check revealed that he was married to Patricia Hardy, a fashion model and actor who appeared in episodes of television's Perry Mason and The Loretta Young Show. They had five children. Egan was a Roman Catholic. He helped aspiring actors break into show business.

Giardina has Egan consumed by thoughts of failure, but it seems far more likely that Egan found satisfaction in his family, his faith and his achieving more success than most in an especially competitive profession.

Giardina tries to make memorable his illustration of Egan by mirroring it in the life of a 12-year-old boy who has an epiphany while at the movies with his friends one summer afternoon. In what is fortunately the only time in The Country of Marriage, Giardina writes partly in the second-person.

You are waiting for your father to come and pick you up. Other boys are there, too, your friends, but you are apart from them. Your father cannot come soon enough, because the afternoon is hot, and because every car that passes contains a man, a tired man, going on a chore, preparing to make a left turn, a man with a list in his head. You are convinced that all of them, your father, too, once felt the very specialness you felt so intently not half an hour ago. It is unbearable to think this, and so you start to run, into that light that seemed so beckoning, that light you thought existed solely so that you could run in it.

Such moments of clarity present themselves to most of us only in retrospect years later. A 12-year-old having a mid-life crisis is as unlikely as Giardina's suggestion of it is uninteresting.


SEVEN OF NINE (Not a Star Trek reference)

Giardina makes so much work so well in seven of his stories that one can overlook the two that do not work. Anyone interested in the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Richard Egan would be better off reading non-fiction about them. Giardina's other short stories are for anyone interested in life.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories of people and marriages in transition, but also stories of people coming to terms with choices they've already made. Giardina is particularly good at reflecting the subtexts people sometimes establish to deal with matters they have no intention of responding to directly ("The Cut of His Jib"). Most of the stories are set in the middle-class environments familiar to readers of literary fiction, but Giardina makes that space his own, and this collection closes with two particularly interesting experiments--the first imagining an F. Scott Fitzgerald fortunate enough to gain a "Second Act" and the second a profile of the actor Richard Egan as filtered through his films.

[Hanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored Giardinas short stories. Even though most of the stories are narrated through the eyes of 40-something males, of whom some are really creepy, Giardina was able to create an overall atmosphere that made it able for me to relate to the characters he invented. There's a certain feeling of sadness and loneliness in each story that felt very authentic and universal to me.

I am also happy that in this case, buying a book solely for the beauty of its cover design worked out. (The cover photo by Robert Adams is absolutely stunning).

[Kate Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy cow this book is amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Giardina knows everything about marriage and he tells it to you here. Don't get married until you read it; don't get divorced until you read it. Don't do nothing until you read this beautiful amazing knowing group of stories. Also, you should buy the hardcover because it's gorgeous. Stunning!

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Men and women facing the tough challenges of marriage. Somewhat melancholy. I didn't like many of the characters, but I ached for them.