Book Review : Wrestling for Meaning in Marriage

A Wrestling Season by Sharon Sheehe Stark (Morrow: $17.95)

Nothing should keep you from reading this novel. And you don’t have to know beans about wrestling to do it. Only incidentally is the story about literal takedowns. More specifically, it is about symbolic takedowns--and recoveries--that occur in close human relationships--marriage in particular, parenthood in particular.

“A Wrestling Season” is Sharon Sheehe Stark’s brilliantly wrought account of a 20-year-old middle-class but unconventional marriage that has reached its struggle time--its wrestling season, its this-is-the-last-battle tournament.

Compelling, deep, richly developed and so funny at times that you burst out laughing, the novel tackles both the surfaces and sub-surfaces of life with such deftness that only after the words have run their course do we know where we’ve been. But we would never have missed being there. Maybe we already have.

The names are changed, the setting is different. Isn’t that always the case? Authors insinuate themselves into our unknown lives, and if they’re successful know how to link us to their characters and make us them.

There are distinctions, of course. Who can identify with Trover Kleeve? The name is ludicrous. He’s a 40-year-old attorney who defends porno film makers and finds his security in a fleet of battered, shimmy-suffering cars that defy charity--especially the charity of his wife. Know Trover? He’s put his family in a rural setting, way outside town, then dawdles his way home each night via bar stops along the route. His house is so packed with his accumulations that he keeps adding rooms to hold them.

And what about his wife, Louise, the bemused almost-nun who can’t quite ever clean up the kitchen? The one whose hemline is always hanging, the one who is so tuned to the sensitivities of her family that she cannot bear the thought of losing any one of them?

Strange Creature

And yet she does come to the point, the inexorable, desperate point of exasperation when she can’t abide this strange creature who shares her bed and calls her Bibs or calls her stupid, this wild, rattling red-bearded bear who pounces around the house when he’s angry, breaking dishes, dumping mixers in the sink, clanging, banging his rage and frustration tune at ear-aching decibels? How do you identify with a woman like Louise who puts up with all of that?

And what about the children? Smart-mouthed Mighty, grown pencil-sharp from a soft stub named Mary Ann. Wise beyond her years, impatient beyond most endurances, terribly tender beneath the peanut-brittle shell. Do you know this child?

And gentle Michael, the unlikely wrestler who sometimes wakes at night to find his heart stopped. Michael, who wrestles on more than a mat inside his lightweight body that sweats and strains for some inkling of what he is all about and what all this stuff that’s going on around him is about. Michael wants to make sense of life.

Short Stay Becomes Long

And what about Louise’s nun friend, Sister Innocent, who comes for a short stay and remains for a month? And Gideon, Mighty’s teen-age friend, who also comes for a short stay and stays much longer? And old Sprecher, who lived on the land long before the Kleeve family brought their belongings there?

So clear do all these characters-cum-people become that we surrender to the perilous, querulous, joyous incidents that comprise their lives.

There is so much laughter and so many tears on these pages that I chased the words to the very end, and when I finished, I knew I’d been some place I needed to be and with people who--with their own reverent and irreverent perceptions and personalities--were unconsciously conducting an illuminating tour.