Are secrets the story of a marriage? Andrew Sean Greer’s novel is about how some people live in their relationships with secrets.  Why is it so difficult, Greer seems to be asking, to talk to the person we say we love, the person we have married?  Is it because we begin the relationship holding back?  Is that it?

As an interpersonal psychologist that is something I rail against in my classes.  I say to my students if you feel you have to hide yourself in the very beginning of the relationship, that hiding will come back to bite you in the ass.  But this novel also seems to be saying that both people are complicit; that if one is hiding, the other is ignoring the signs of that hiding and making up a truth to help keep the secret, secret.

No, this is not an analytical novel of ideas.  This is a story that captures you from that first line; “We think we know the ones we love.”  Immediately we are hearing a voice of truth; someone who is telling us a story we yearn to know.  She says,

“Our husbands, our wives. We know them—we are them, sometimes… We watch their tics of conversation, of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare as it turns white to brown, then drop it, satisfied, into the cup.  I watched my own husband do that every morning; I was a vigilant wife.”

Into the midst of that relationship, however, a stranger comes. Into this wife’s home and life, a stranger walks and eventually demands that things change. The stranger tells this wife that her husband is not who he has been acting the part of being.  Not the cliché of someone hiding a whole identity, but, she thinks she learns from the stranger, someone who has not told her, his wife, his hearts real desire.

Pearlie’s voice is the one telling this story.  And her voice is compelling; taking us along what feels to be a fast drive in a powerful car. We are learning some things as she is learning those same facts. She says, “We think we know the ones we love…

“…and though we should not be surprised that we don’t, it is heartbreak nonetheless.  It is the hardest kind of knowledge, not just about another but about ourselves. To see our lives as a fiction we have written and believed. Silence and lies.”

Still early in this novel, the author had me sitting forward in my seat, leaning closer to the book itself, trying to get inside the story.  And I got enough hints that I begin to build the story.  I thought I could see the outline and features of the story.

And then one line stopped me cold. I pushed the book away from myself and sitting alone said out loud, “what?” That one line sent me flipping back through the forty-eight pages I had just read. “Really?” I was saying to myself, as I looked for the way the trick was pulled on me.  But there was no trick.  Greer, the author, simply had allowed me to build my own fiction about this narrator.  So that moment in this novel had showed how easily we all start to make assumptions about a person based on our own limited frame of reference.  We, of course, do this sometimes as we start a relationship.

That moment transformed this novel into a domestic mystery and lesson.  And even as I tried to be more careful about making assumptions, I was still doing so.  Here again was something I try to teach my students; that one of the dilemmas of relationships is that we are always trying to guess what is going on in our partner’s head.  We do this because intuitively we know that no matter what words come out of our partner’s mouth, there is some chance they are hiding something from us.

Yet we are part of the problem; creating the relationship in our minds.  Too often, that creation is based on a misguided and fearful notion of how relationships work.  We refuse to be vulnerable and reveal our hearts deepest desire and so develop a relationship with someone likewise so misguided and fearful.  Pearlie tells us how she saw relationships:

“…my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you are stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure.”

In 2008, twenty-five percent of married American couples described their relationship as peaceful co-existence.  That can only happen when people are in fear of first accepting, and second revealing, the truth of who they are to their partner in marriage; in “love.”  So even when the two people do care for each other in a deep way, neither ever really has evidence of that caring because both are tight lipped about what really matters to them.

We think we know people.  Yet the truth is that we cannot know the other person without knowing and revealing ourselves. Like in relationships, there is a real mystery in this lovely novel. There is also much disturbing, sobering wisdom within its pages. If you want a better grasp of the mysteries of relationships, and a bit of wisdom about what we risk by being silent with our partners, please read this book; please.