NOVEMBER 2011 - AudioFile
Choosing Barbara Caruso for Lily Tuck’s elegiac new novel is inspired casting. Nina, whose thoughts we hear through a long night as she sits alone with the body of her husband, is from “all over,” having lived in Europe and South America, and speaks fluent French. Caruso gives her an elegant American voice with the tiniest burr of something exotic, which seems just right as Nina thinks back through a long, loving, but not uncomplicated marriage, and forward again to the stunning present, trying to accept the unthinkable fact that Philip is not just napping before dinner, but dead. Tuck’s skill is immense, as is Caruso’s, and there’s not a word of this heartbreaking but compelling listening experience that feels false or unearned. B.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
Marie Arana
…strangely captivating…as Nina contemplates her dead husband's math lectures…the story becomes steadily more absorbing, and the sum of the novel's parts is well worth the effort.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly - Audio
In this audio edition of Tuck’s latest novel, when artist and homemaker Nina discovers the dead body of her mathematician husband, Philip, she ruminates over the peaks and valleys of their marriage, as household objects—e.g., a well-worn jacket, the table setting for an uneaten dinner—trigger vivid memories including everything from youthful courtship in Paris to adultery, angst, and the trials of parenthood. Barbara Caruso’s nuanced narration and crisp delivery match the author’s prose and her command of language. Additionally, Caruso’s tone—which conveys shock too recent to manifest itself as screams and the simultaneous experience of fatigue and insomnia—captures the essence of Nina. Highly recommended for fans of contemporary literary fiction. An Atlantic Monthly hardcover. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
A Best Book of the Year:
Boston Globe
Chicago Tribune
National Post
Publishers Weekly
"One of the most beautiful love songs in novel form you'll ever read . . . Tuck is a genius with moments . . . Her ability to capture beauty will remind readers of Margaret Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras."—Los Angeles Book Review
"[A] moving narrative . . . Poetic and absorbing . . . The final passages, as dawn breaks in thie new widow's life, as re a rare and elegant affirmation of the transcendence of love."—The Daily Beast
"Beautiful . . . Tuck produces spare prose that doesn't sacrifice tension or emotion in its economy. . . . An artfully crafted still life of one couple's marraige." —Boston Globe
"Sweet, tender and compelling."—Chicago Tribune (Best Books of the Year)
"This slim brush of a book manages to accomplish in a mere 200-plus pages what many novelists try to do in twice the verbiage. . . . Examines the disguises and surprises that energize a lasting marriage." —The Seattle Times
"An elegant vigil . . . A poised, readable, immediate novel."—The Guardian
"Luminous . . . Spare but deep." —NPR
"A magical, truthful tale." —Huffington Post (Best Upcoming Books for Fall)
"Captivating . . . Absorbing . . . Strikes a chord."—The Washington Post
"Fearless and absorbing . . . What Tuck has captured so deftly is the essence of a bereaved wandering mind, with its detours and tangents. . . . Intense, brutal, and stunning." —The Portland Press Herald
"The writing is lyrical and striking, vividly capturing the nature of memory and the way in which love, though never simple, is contained and proven in the small, indelible moments of our lives. . . . This slim, magnificent novel is rarefied by its heartbreaking immediacy, and the moving, aching stream of consciousness chronicles not only the psychology of shock and mourning, but also the minute-by-minute way in which Nine begins to put life as she knows it in the past tense." —BookPage
“A breathlessly mannered, affecting new work . . . Small, vital snapshots make up two lives closely shared, and beautifully portrayed in this triumph of a novel."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A tender look at marriage, mathematics, life and death, and the intricacies of love . . . I Married You for Happiness elegiac and joyful simultaneously—a love letter to this marriage and to the idea of marriage in general." —Book Browse
"Tuck's crisp writing is a joy."—Kirkus Reviews
"A full and satisfying potrayal of a marriage . . . Great fodder for readers who enjoy pondering life's larger questions.”—Library Journal
"Affecting, original . . . Rich in sentiment, poignancy, and honesty."—Booklist
"Tuck is an elegant, spare writer who limns her characters in a few swift sentences. . . . Her ability to work mathematical concepts into a literary novel is impressive. . . . For the unmarried, I Married You for Happiness will do what great fiction does: draw you into another's life, allowing you to inhabit it vicariously, emerging with an increased understanding of something previously unknown. If you are happily married, your worst fears about your spouse predeceasing you will be miserably, brightly illuminated, the better you may see them in the harshly brilliant light of quality fiction." —PopMatters
Washington Post
Tuck’s skill is immense, as is Caruso’s, and there’s not a word of this heartbreaking but compelling listening experience that feels false or unearned.”
—AudioFile
Library Journal
Tuck opens her fifth novel (and her first since National Book Award winner The News from Paraguay) with the sudden death of the main character, mathematician and professor Philip. His wife, Nina, spends the night reminiscing in brief episodic flashbacks that meander through their decades together from their meeting in Paris and the birth of daughter Louise to Philip's various academic appointments and travels. Snippets from Philip's mathematics lectures and Nina's artistic sensibilities expose a passionate and complicated union. Tuck's spare prose accelerates as Nina reaches morning, and we are left with a full and satisfying portrayal of a marriage and, perhaps, the discovery of the more poetic side of higher mathematics. VERDICT Fans of literary fiction should appreciate this one. Recommended to those who favor domestic fiction or a focus on personal relationships. Great fodder for readers who enjoy pondering life's larger questions.—Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast, TX
Kirkus Reviews
Using shards of memory, Tuck creates the portrait of a marriage in her latest, following the NBA winnerThe News from Paraguay(2004, etc.).
Nina and Philip have been married for 42 years. He's a university mathematician, she's an artist. His death is as quiet as the fall of a leaf. He returns to their Massachusetts home to rest before dinner. Nina finds him dead. Cardiac arrest, says her neighbor, an endocrinologist. Here Tuck suspends time, allowing Nina, during the night ahead, to sift through the memories and images from their life together. Tuck uses a loose variation of a binary, Hegelian model. On the one hand are the mathematical formulations spelled out by Philip in the lecture hall and over the dinner table; he's a popular, witty teacher. Numbers represent logic and order; they are beyond time. In opposition are Nina's memories, their wild disorder at the mercy of time. These are "the manifestations of the inner self," Nina's reference to a Nathalie Sarraute novel she's reading when Philip hits on her at a café in Paris, their first meeting. It is daring of Tuck to set their courtship in Paris, such well-trodden ground for young lovers. The result is a somewhat synthetic charm. What's real, shockingly so, is Nina's rape by Philip's French cousin in a forest outside the city. Nina never told Philip about the rape or its consequence, a risky back-alley abortion; another secret was her one infidelity, a summer fling with a yachtsman in Brittany. Was Philip faithful to her? Nina doesn't know, but she has a jealous temperament, an irritant among her many happy memories of lovemaking, meals and shared laughter. Another possible irritant, the contrast between Philip's successful career and Nina's failure to make it commercially, goes unaddressed, a disconcerting omission masked by exotic vacation travel writing.
Does the couple's mutual happiness provide a Hegelian synthesis? Not quite, though Tuck's crisp writing is a joy.
