The Exciting Rise and Fall of an Adulterous Love Affair

Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin (Knopf: $13.95)

If Laurie Colwin is a warm-water pipe, her metal is as well-tempered and precisely turned as that of her sisters and brothers on the cold-water side of the modern American novel. She handles feeling as cunningly as Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme handle numbness.

“Another Marvelous Thing,” a chain of stories about the rise and fall of an adulterous love affair, skitters, leaps and dodges over a variety of literary sinkholes, and accumulates excitement for never once falling in. It is tender without sentimentality, witty without posturing, clear-minded without cynicism and winning without being winsome. It has acute and alluring things to say about the fog between the sexes; and in its idiosyncratic way, it manages to be a feminist book that is fond of women.

It is also a tour de force. Colwin has a shining sense of form. She has written, one by one, eight short stories that gain strength for being put together. Virtually a novel, they are eight glimpses, each from a slightly different angle, of the waxing and waning passion between Billy Delielle, a tough-talking inwardly tender young woman; and Frank Clemens, much older, and the reverse.

Two Wonderful Marriages

Both are prosperous urban intellectuals; they are economists, in fact, and meet at their publisher’s party. Both have wonderful marriages; and if Colwin puts a suggestion of quotation marks around Frank’s, she is quite straightforward about Billy’s.

Her point is that “wonderful” is not enough; life is a stream, not an ornamental pond. But what Billy lacks and what Frank lacks are not the same thing. Her husband is a brilliant, devoted and perfectly engaging young man; her problem is that they knew each other from childhood, and the marriage seems ordained. She craves something splashy and wrong-headed before going on with her life.

Frank, married for years, has two grown children. His wife is accomplished and successful. They have built up a whole history of shared interests and good taste; but intimacy and need have withered. Billy is no interlude but a last holiday. Their mutual passion is both whole-hearted and limited; it is Colwin’s achievement that her characters and the reader realize this only patchily, and none of the three of us at the same time. For Billy, the break-up means advancing back into life and her marriage, and having a baby. For Frank, it means life departing.

An Absurd Couple

They make a winning and faintly absurd couple, utterly in love and comically distant in every other respect. Colwin portrays both the love and the incompatibility; and the unstable combination gives the stories a tingling energy and unpredictability.

Frank is uxorious and sentimental. He wants long talks, elaborate meals and romantic settings. When they go away to the country, it is he who brings the sheets and the food.

For her part, Billy is deliberately flip. She calls Frank “her mistress” and “her bit of fluff,” and insists on using her bare study as the site for their trysts.

He dreams of post-coital roast beef sandwiches with dill mayonnaise, and is fed, instead, the moldy contents of her icebox. Billy had, he reflects, “the snacking habits of an English clubman.”

What Frank has to offer is, temporarily, himself; but it is a middle-aged self of possessions, habits and tastes that all bear the marks of his married life. A year into their affair, he offers Billy, for the second time, his wife’s recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing.

Frank’s solicitousness and Billy’s guardedness conceal deeper things. Billy disturbs and obsesses him, but she doesn’t really threaten a life that is so thoroughly established. Frank will not break up his marriage. He asks Billy if she loves him more or differently than she does husband, but, Colwin notes wickedly: “He did not want to know any of the possible answers to this question.”

Billy’s evasiveness defends her vulnerability. Her life with her husband is too new to be fortified. She can’t maintain the relationship as a separate province. Finally, after repeated trial breakups, each of which ends up on her study couch, it is she who closes the affair.

Viewed From Outside

The breakup, told in the last few stories, is perhaps the best thing in what I think is Colwin’s finest work. It does not come from inside the lovers’ world but from outside. The claims of Billy’s life take over. She goes with her husband to the wedding of a friend; and suddenly it seems intolerable that Frank has seen the dress she is wearing before her husband does.

The title story, the seventh in the book, tells of Billy’s difficult pregnancy and delivery, her husband’s devoted companionship, and her delight in her baby. In an earlier story, she had told Frank that he was a temporary substitute for a baby; now he is excluded, and the affair seemingly dead.

This is not quite Colwin’s intention, though. In a last subtle and beautifully written story, Billy, carrying her baby in a sling, meets Frank at another party. They go out for a drink. He is ironic though affectionate; keeping the memory of their affair at a safe distance. She avows to herself the things that are still alive from it.

“Another Marvelous Thing” is virtually flawless but it has one or two imbalances. Frank’s wife is pictured too easily as a chilly taste-snob. We never see the effect the affair has on their relationship; it seems too facile to assume that there is none. That would be material for a different book. Colwin, like the best writers, seems to open up new subjects for herself.