"WE THINK we know the ones we love," begins Andrew Sean Greer's bewitching third novel, "The Story of a Marriage," a book whose linguistic prowess and raw storytelling power is almost disruptive to the reader. It's too good to put down and yet each passage is also too good to leave behind.
The story, which is told in retrospect, begins in 1953. Eisenhower and Nixon have just been sworn in and America is rebounding from World War II. It is a time when books can be rented from Macy's, the seltzer boy makes house calls and, for those who don't have a refrigerator, the ice man goes door to door.
This is the world of Pearlie and Holland Cook, a young couple living in a tiny, vine-covered house in San Francisco's Outer Sunset, a quiet, fog-drenched residential district butting up against the Pacific as if it were teetering on the edge of the world. Unlike the rest of hilly San Francisco, the Outer Sunset is bare and flat, studded with simple, pastel-colored row homes -- a sleepy, gusty neighborhood where gritty specks of sand stick in the air and, in the early morning, one can hear the occasional apocalyptic roar of a lion from the nearby zoo.
Pearlie adores Holland, whose striking good looks have an almost grotesquely magnetic effect on strangers. She loves him "like a field on fire" and is a devoted housewife and doting mother to their small son. Then, one day, an elegantly dressed stranger shows up on their doorstep. He asks Pearlie a question that will send her placid daily routine and, in fact, her very worldview wildly off-course. He infiltrates the family's lives for six emotionally charged months, then offers them $100,000 cash to make an unspeakable choice. Not much more can be revealed without ruining Greer's crafty and addictive story. But, suffice to say, there is: an affair, an unexpected friendship, a letter that hits its recipient like a bullet, some tears and many secrets. Every 20 pages or so, the plot implodes and the characters reveal themselves. Again and again.
The point, of course, is that things are never as they seem. Especially in love and marriage. "We think we know them. We think we love them," Greer writes. "But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know."
