I Married You for Happiness

by Lily Tuck, Barbara Caruso (Narrated by)

Overview

Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Lily Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet. “His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Still too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician: a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that defined Nina and Philip's life together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611746198
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	09/20/2011
Edition description:	Unabriged; 5 hours
Pages:	5
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lily Tuck is the author of several novels, including: I Married You for Happiness; The Woman Who Walked on Water; Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The News From Paraguay, winner of the National Book Award; and the biography Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

October 10, 1939

Place of Birth:

Paris, France

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe (Harvard); M.A., Sorbonne, Paris

Editorial Reviews

In this audio edition of Tuck’s latest novel, when artist and homemaker Nina discovers the dead body of her mathematician husband, Philip, she ruminates over the peaks and valleys of their marriage, as household objects—e.g., a well-worn jacket, the table setting for an uneaten dinner—trigger vivid memories including everything from youthful courtship in Paris to adultery, angst, and the trials of parenthood. Barbara Caruso’s nuanced narration and crisp delivery match the author’s prose and her command of language. Additionally, Caruso’s tone—which conveys shock too recent to manifest itself as screams and the simultaneous experience of fatigue and insomnia—captures the essence of Nina. Highly recommended for fans of contemporary literary fiction. An Atlantic Monthly hardcover. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Audio

Barbara Caruso’s nuanced narration and crisp delivery match the author’s prose and her command of language. . . . Highly recommended for fans of contemporary literary fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Strangely captivating. . . . It will make you chafe. It will strike a chord.”
—Washington Post

From the Publisher

Tuck’s skill is immense, as is Caruso’s, and there’s not a word of this heartbreaking but compelling listening experience that feels false or unearned.”
—AudioFile

Washington Post

Tuck opens her fifth novel (and her first since National Book Award winner The News from Paraguay) with the sudden death of the main character, mathematician and professor Philip. His wife, Nina, spends the night reminiscing in brief episodic flashbacks that meander through their decades together from their meeting in Paris and the birth of daughter Louise to Philip's various academic appointments and travels. Snippets from Philip's mathematics lectures and Nina's artistic sensibilities expose a passionate and complicated union. Tuck's spare prose accelerates as Nina reaches morning, and we are left with a full and satisfying portrayal of a marriage and, perhaps, the discovery of the more poetic side of higher mathematics. VERDICT Fans of literary fiction should appreciate this one. Recommended to those who favor domestic fiction or a focus on personal relationships. Great fodder for readers who enjoy pondering life's larger questions.—Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast, TX

Library Journal

Using shards of memory, Tuck creates the portrait of a marriage in her latest, following the NBA winnerThe News from Paraguay(2004, etc.).

Nina and Philip have been married for 42 years. He's a university mathematician, she's an artist. His death is as quiet as the fall of a leaf. He returns to their Massachusetts home to rest before dinner. Nina finds him dead. Cardiac arrest, says her neighbor, an endocrinologist. Here Tuck suspends time, allowing Nina, during the night ahead, to sift through the memories and images from their life together. Tuck uses a loose variation of a binary, Hegelian model. On the one hand are the mathematical formulations spelled out by Philip in the lecture hall and over the dinner table; he's a popular, witty teacher. Numbers represent logic and order; they are beyond time. In opposition are Nina's memories, their wild disorder at the mercy of time. These are "the manifestations of the inner self," Nina's reference to a Nathalie Sarraute novel she's reading when Philip hits on her at a café in Paris, their first meeting. It is daring of Tuck to set their courtship in Paris, such well-trodden ground for young lovers. The result is a somewhat synthetic charm. What's real, shockingly so, is Nina's rape by Philip's French cousin in a forest outside the city. Nina never told Philip about the rape or its consequence, a risky back-alley abortion; another secret was her one infidelity, a summer fling with a yachtsman in Brittany. Was Philip faithful to her? Nina doesn't know, but she has a jealous temperament, an irritant among her many happy memories of lovemaking, meals and shared laughter. Another possible irritant, the contrast between Philip's successful career and Nina's failure to make it commercially, goes unaddressed, a disconcerting omission masked by exotic vacation travel writing.

Does the couple's mutual happiness provide a Hegelian synthesis? Not quite, though Tuck's crisp writing is a joy.

Kirkus Reviews