Marriage is one of life’s great mysteries. What makes a marriage work? What makes it fail? Why do certain couples simply come apart, while others, however patently incompatible, continue to exist together in a twilit half-life, joined by some invisible and unbreakable bond? Marriage is a bargain; a poor bargain for all too many.
Tolstoy’s famous claim that all happy families are alike has been disproved time and again—there are many, many ways of being happy, or at least contented—but his corresponding dictum that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is unarguable: the unhappy marriage, in particular, has always been a staple of literature. David and Dora Copperfield, Molly and Leopold Bloom, Charles and Emma Bovary, Jason and Medea, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, Swann and Odette, Anna and Alexei Karenin, Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth, Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond, Nora and Torvald Helmer, Jude and Sue Fawley, Humbert Humbert and Charlotte Haze: there are almost as many, and as various, ways of being unhappily married in literature as there are in life. Every so often we encounter some middle-aged or elderly couple who appears so grotesquely ill-suited that our only response is to wonder how on earth they could have come together. Life seldom offers us an explanation; good fiction does.
The Irish-born short-story writer Maeve Brennan left a very slim output of work upon her death in 1993, but among her stories are six that, taken together, comprise
