FAITHFUL

A crude debut about youthful marriage and the sad calamities that can befall it—with characters that, at very, very best, fail to earn reader sympathy.

You can see it coming a mile away—that Nick Clifford, successful young broker on the London stock exchange, shouldn’t have upped and married this girl—Trish, she’s called—after so short a courtship. Nick is so head-over-heels that when they’re first apart (Trish is an airline stewardess) he goes around the apartment sniffing the various scents she’s left behind—while she, at the same moment, is banging her brains out with a total stranger who very, very much loves her bum. Well, Trish gets pregnant—by Nick—but, quick as a wink and well before the delivery, her old boyfriend and lover, the crude and ultrasuccessful media-man, Joe, reenters the scene, begs for her hand—and gets it! So Trish and Joe set up household together, while poor paternal Nick watches from the sidelines. When baby-girl Charlotte is born, Nick is smitten like any first daddy, though logistics are complicated now that he’s taken a job in New York and has to jet back and forth over the wide Atlantic to spend sensitive and caring weekends with darling baby. Who really loves who? And what will conceivably come of it all—especially when Trish, though Joe’s sworn and true mate, nevertheless happily bangs away with Nick every time he returns for a London weekend? Nick also has his own stateside sweetie, the gorgeous and flat-flat-flat Sareen (“wow, has she ever come through for him”), who seems conveniently open to any extent of abuse. When Nick and Joe, in a scene stupendously unreal and contrived, are put in the same room together alone, they realize that Trish is banging both—and Trish herself, entering stage left, adds to the subtlety (“Fine, I’m evil. Bitch, cunt, whore. Now fuck off”). After such eloquence, what forgiveness?

Dumb, thin, meretricious, absurd.