MARRIAGES AND OTHER DILEMMAS

Beer, the author of The Hampshire Project(2017), combines fictional tales with personal recollections to explore themes of marriage and infidelity.

The book opens with 16 short stories that describe relationships gone stale and tackle themes of temptation and betrayal. The opening work, “The Old Lies Are the Truth,” is about Harry, an elderly man whose wife is sent to a nursing home while he continues an affair with his mistress, Grace. When his daughter returns home, they’re both forced to confront old emotional scars as well as new wounds. In “Amy’s Arm,” two savagely competitive sisters lead very different lives but unexpectedly come together when one is injured in combat. In the timely “The Voyage,” a couple whose marriage is struggling take a cruise only for their ship to come under quarantine because of the Covid-19 outbreak. The stories are followed by Beer’s short memoir, which describes her growing up in New England as the privileged child of a Harvard academic, her time spent studying at Harvard and Cornell, her marriages and heartbreaks, and her finding a vocation as a writer. Readers may be surprised to find a collection of stories and a memoir in the same volume, but this bold decision may be an attempt by the author to show how her life shaped her work. And, indeed, it’s an interesting exercise to identify echoes of Beer’s past in her fiction. However, the two genres don’t sit well together; the memoir reads as an afterthought, characterized by hurried reflection: “My mom dies in 1987. Packing for the airport, my knees don’t work—I have to walk around with bent legs.” Overall, the emotional impact of key life events feels unnecessarily condensed. Similarly, Beer’s short stories, with few exceptions, flatly narrate their events: “they spent a lot of it in bed, at least at first. Luckily he was able to take Viagra, so that was great, but sometimes they just skipped it and invented new substitutes.” There are a few unpredictable plot twists and provocative love triangles, but they’re insufficient for truly compelling reading.

An unsuccessful hybrid hampered by unengaging writing.