A Happy Marriage

Although it had been recommended by a close and trusted friend, I dreaded reading `A Happy Marriage', as I was still trying to sort out mine. My wife died two and a half years ago, after 25 years of breast cancer. That adds up to a lot of poison, slash and burn, clinical trials, and anxiety about the next test results. But from the first sentence on the first page, all my fears melted away. Reading through the novel was the most sustained emotional experience I have ever had from fiction, and by the end I realized that Rafael Yglesias had written a great novel, with not a single false word. He knows people like Tolstoy knows people. Even more astonishing, I realized that I now better understood my own marriage, because for all the differences, we shared the same underlying pattern of beginning, middle and end. I am deeply grateful for his artistry, and for his humanness. If you're looking for a lifeline in the sea of triviality and nonsense in which we all swim, `A Happy Marriage' is it.

I read "A Happy Marriage" while on vacation in Costa Rica. It was so engrossing and beautifully written that I couldn't wait to return to my room to read it each night. Yglesias juxtaposes the past with the present, alternating chapters that focus on Enrique and Margaret's courtship and marriage with those focusing on how the couple faces Margaret's impending death. Readers get a front-row seat to three decades of a marriage--the good, the bad and the ugly. In the process, they watch as Enrique--funny and intelligent but riddled with insecurities--evolves into a loving husband who finds the strength and grace to help his wife die as she chooses. As a hospice volunteer, I know what a gargantuan a task that is, and Yglesias describes the experience masterfully. This book took courage to write, and I felt honored to have read it.

We all create narratives to help us shape the way we interpret events, especially those that are chaotic. It's a way to shape the story to make sense of the chaos and to reestablish some feeling of order. Those narratives are both true and not true. Rafael Yglesias's narrative is both true and not true. He had the brilliant idea of making it an autobiographical novel in order to better get at the truth. Literal truth? Not always. Emotional truth? On every page. In many ways this novel is more honest than many memoirs are. Because of the psychological reality, I found myself identifying with parts of each character--the good qualities and the shameful ones. Yglesias spares neither the reader nor himself. But you won't be the same person when you finish it that you were when you started. Margaret, the wife, dies a horrific death, but she has the inner resources and strength and pluck - with the help of her husband - to complete her life with final goodbyes and chores done. When the time comes, I'd like that opportunity. In the book - as in life - the body is paramount. The body is the central motif in the narrative to show how he loved her body, showed love through his own body, and in the end took care of her deteriorating body. Paradoxically, the book suggests that only through the limitations of our bodies can we transcend them to love wholly (agape). The characters come to life: the cautious in-laws, the controlling wife, the feckless brother, and the doing-the-best-that-I-can Enrique. You won't always like him, but you will love him overall. It's harder to get a fix on Margaret. Would I like her? not like her? I couldn't tell since it was all written from his very limited point of view. The structure of the book is inspired. Chapters alternate in exactly the right way, from early in the relationship, middle of the relationship, and the last three weeks of their concrete relationship. There's nothing haphazard about the placement. You get breathing room in between, but still- you ride the waves when they ebb and when they flow, and you come to a harbor at the end, though not necessarily a safe one. Even though a family has been fractured and great suffering has been endured, one takes comfort from reading about the love and care and compassion that one can give to another who is dying or in crisis. Take a look at the cover when you finish the book. You will be moved when you realize what it is.I recommend this book unqualifiedly, especially for those who are or have been married for a number of years. Go buy it. You'll thank the person who told you about it.

Yglesias's novel is beautifully wrought, with meticulously crafted characters moving through the heartbreaking denouement of a thirty-year romance. Enrique, the protagonist, is saddled with the burden of herding his family through the final days of his wife Margaret's life. In between the episodes of final goodbyes and medical crises, the reader sees how their romance started and how it unfolded through their years of happy marriage. Of course, it could hardly be happy in the sense of blissfully moving from one joyous moment to the next. They have their problems, including the near dissolution of their marriage in its early years. What makes the reader cheer from the sidelines, even while it is revealed that Enrique had an affair, is the way he desperately wants to tell his wife, at the end of her life, how much he loves her, how much her very existence has made life worth living. His fear, as he coordinates a social calendar of final goodbyes for her friends and family, is that he won't have a chance to tell her. This fear is pervasive, and seeing how these final days unfold make the novel engrossing. Yglesias employs beautiful turns of phrase throughout the novel, putting words to feelings that many have experienced while dealing with the illness and death of a loved one. Enrique reveals how difficult it is to help other people cope emotionally, when he is trying so hard himself to do that as well: they were "demanding he put Band-Aids on their scrapes while he was bleeding to death" (88). Enrique deals with the demands of family, particularly Margaret's parents concern with funeral arrangements. In passages like this, Yglesias shines in describing Margaret's mother's need to control the arrangements, to have them just the way her family has always had them, because the need for something familiar would almost make one feel safe in the midst of the uncertainty of a life without Margaret (184). There are witty passages as well, like Enrique's internal debate about selecting pants to wear on his first date with Margaret (129). Enrique and Margaret are great conversational foils, never devolving into the pattern of saying the same things to each other repeatedly, nor remaining silent because, after all these years, there is nothing left to say. Their relationship is alive and vibrant, and they still can surprise each other when they open their mouths. This is something beautiful to see, and it makes the ending of the novel so hard to bear. The first chapter didn't draw me in to the novel the way that the second - and each subsequent chapter - did. I do not mention this as a critique, but rather so that readers know that they might not be enthralled on first meeting the characters, but it is worth hanging on for a few more pages to let this story get a running start. I think the great strength of this novel is the detailed expression of the emotions that swirl around the beginning and end of this marriage. These characters are v