Sometimes they looked at each other, aroused half out of their minds by the thought that each had been making love with another, and it would be enough to make them want to do it--together--all over again. Well, almost enough...
Reader from Evanston, IL
Marriage is the first pice of Irvingian writing that fully shows his storytelling abilities. You are sucked into the plot, you admire the construction of dialogues - these is also something unique to his prose, and I am not educated enough to say precisely what...Two couples exchange partners, including women themselves having some fun, but contrary to the first and next impression you have, the motives are not so straightforward as they may seem. Unlike his other books, here we have only four heroes, and the story is very condensed...
Reader from Long Island, NY:
Quite possibly one of the worst books I have ever spent money and wasted time on.
CRITICS' REVIEWS:
Terrence Des Pres:
The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a menage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intenioned, destructive.
A Typical American Novel?
