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I married you for happiness

I married you for happiness

By Lily Tuck

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside, she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

And so begins Lily Tuck’s novel of courtship, long marriage, and death. The starting point for I married you for happiness is Nina’s calls for her husband Philip to come to dinner, only to realize that he is not going to awaken from his nap. Her first decision is that she will not give her adult daughter the sad news until morning, and her second is that she will spend one last night with her husband before she notifies anyone.

This slim novel ends the next morning, but during the course of the evening takes the reader through the complexities of a modern marriage: the triumphs and losses, passion and regret, fidelity and betrayal that make up even those unions enduring until “death do us part.”

As this reader began the novel he was creeped out when the wife climbed into bed with her dead husband, held his hand, and kissed his cheek. But for good reason, Tuck was a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for an earlier book, and a National Book Award winner for another: the woman can write.

The narrative emerges from a series of brief stream of consciousness vignettes and reflections that travel non-chronologically through time, sometimes reporting alternate versions of the same event. Despite this technique, the story sustains tension as it is linked seamlessly through recurring images.

An author does well to make a reader uncomfortable and curious. Maybe the subject matter is less morbid than it first appears, perhaps the stuff of life; the telling gives us glimpses into our own pasts.

Once I confronted an author about a plot turn that I as a reader considered unrealistic only to be told that no one knows their response to a given traumatic situation. “I might lock myself in my closet and gnaw on my raincoat,” that author said.

Or crawl into bed with a person you love, who has recently passed.

Because I married you for happiness is a short read, a short review is fitting. Readers may well find that the images in this exploration of lives linked by love stay with them.