by Andrew Sean Greer.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 195 pages. $22.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

“We think we know the ones we love,” begins Pearlie, the narrator of this wise, perceptive, consistently surprising novel, an understatement that morphs into a tortuously, heartbreakingly penetrating look at her marriage to Holland Cook right after World War II in San Francisco.

Things shift radically when in 1953 Charles “Buzz” Drummer appears at her front door and tells her that in a hospital, where he and Holland were recovering from various wounds and the tincture of madness, they were “together.” The revelation, the first of many to come, jolts Pearlie who then feels “a small, growing surge of relief. He made sense, my husband, at last.” What will happen to her and their son Sonny?

Soon after this we learn that Pearlie’s black, adding a sudden new dimension to her developing dilemma. Holland’s so handsome that he’s the focus of everybody’s fantasies and remains vague and aloof, his fate to be decided by others. Pearlie and Buzz form a secret alliance that involves a possible “buy-out” for Pearlie and the drafting of the boyfriend of a young girl Holland may also have his eye on.

Beneath its grim veneer of normalcy, Greer’s 1950s reveal layers of anxiety, not just sexual and racial but also mortal as World War II gives way to the Cold War, Korea and nuclear terrors. Each intensifies the other.

Greer, author of the bestseller The Confessions of Max Tivoli, captures brilliantly the fluid dynamics of human relationships, the shifts and eruptions, the fragility of such incendiary webs that entrap spouses, lovers, friends, and the times they live in. As Pearlie reflects, “The way we lived would not do, would not hold. A decade from now, and nothing would be familiar in this spot. Not even me.”

One line that seemed to encapsulate the all-too-human vision of this novel caught my eye. Greer comments on a dog in a car that “readjusted its position of longing.” That’s what this book achieves as those positions collapse, regroup, change, merge and shatter. And another: “Marriage is a fairy tale, and, like those stories, it requires a bewitching bargain.”

We learn more about Pearlie’s relationship with Holland in Kentucky when he was dodging the draft in the upstairs room of his mother’s house; about Buzz and his participation in an experiment in starvation; of Holland who quietly stuns and surprises.

Of race and sex, Pearlie admits, “I knew silence. Which like an exotic poison — odorless, tasteless — brings a subtle madness to the victim.” Breaking her silence in this breathtaking anatomy of love, loss, grief, betrayal and self-doubt illuminates the labyrinthine human condition. THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE,

samcoale@cox.net