Ben Greenman - The Slippage

Frederick Busch, Harry and Catherine . Busch is one of my favorites, for his clear-eyed prose and his devotion to real people. This novel takes place solidly in the real world, with politics and history underlying an adult love story. It’s beautifully written and expansive when it comes to ordinary human emotions.

Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate.”For years, Moore has been putting up good work on this particular plot of land. This story is about illness and compromise and violence and the importance of humor in dissolving all those things, at least temporarily. It also contains a great working definition of marriage: “a fine arrangement generally, except one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates . This, in a way, is the counterweight or countermovement to the Moore story. The people may be specific, but the world they inhabit is very general, satirical in the broad sense. I thought about the Lurie book often as I wrote my own, though they have very little in common. Oh, also, Mick Jagger is in the TV-movie version of the Lurie book.

The Bible.My book is a book about infidelity, at least somewhat, and it raises the question of whether it can be part of a healthy marriage. Statistics say yes. The Bible says no. But what else does the Bible say? Let’s look at Deuteronomy 22: “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, and give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.” Family values, I guess.

Donald Westlake, Drowned Hopes . Westlake’s the best, and this is one of his best, a heist book with a nearly perfect hopelessness. Why is it also a book about marriage? Because there’s one little subplot involving Bob, a guard at a reservoir, who is thrust into a hastily arranged marriage with his girlfriend, Tiffany. The marriage and its accompanying pressures proceed directly to Bob’s brain and attack it via nervous breakdown. Bob’s story only takes up a few short chapters — they’re central to the plot, but marginal to the main characters — and it functions like the cartoons around the edges of Mad magazine. Still, it’s one of my favorite portraits of American marriage.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.