the marriage game

Feel like reading books that will crush your vision of marriage? Yates and Updike do just that, but they do it so well.
Both novels circle around themes of adultery, the search for self, marital balance and selfishness, yet the writing is strikingly beautiful and honest.
Below are passages taken from each of the novels - hopefully they will be enough to get you to pick up a copy.

Let's face it, movies are never as good as the books the stories were taken from. I thought the Revolutionary Road movie was extremely well done, but it still doesn't quite compare to the book.



"He rolled heavily upright and groped for his bathrobe, moistening the wrinkled roof of his mouth. Then he went and squinted through the brilliant window. It was April herself, stolidly pushing and hauling the old machine, wearing a man's shirt and loose, flapping slacks, while both children romped behind her with handfuls of cut grass.
In the bathroom he used enough cold water and toothpaste and kleenex to revive the working parts of his head; he restored its ability to gather oxygen and regained a certain muscular control over its features. But nothing could be done about his hands. Bloated and pale, they felt as if all their bones had been painlessly removed. A command to clench them into fists would have sent him whimpering to his knees. Looking at them, and particularly at the bitten-down nails that never in his life had had a chance to grow, he wanted to beat and bruise them against the edge of the sink. He thought then of his father's hands, and this reminded him that his dream just now, just before the lawn mower and the headache and the sun, had been of a dim and tranquil time long ago. Both his parents had been there, and he heard his mother say, 'Oh, don't wake him, Earl; let him sleep.' He tried his best to remember more of it, and couldn't; but the tenderness of it brought him close to tears for a moment until it faded away."




"'Sally!' He was on the sunless side of I Street, hatless, his arm lifted as if for a taxi. In a business suit, he looked disconcertingly like everyone else, and as he waited at the intersection for the electric permission to walk, her stomach dipped as if she had been snapped awake two hundred miles from home. She asked herself, who is this man? The sign said WALK. At the head of the pack, he trotted towards her; her heart thrashed. She hung helplessly on the curb while the distance between them diminished and her body, her whole hollowed body, remembered his twitchy posing hands, his hook nose that never took a tan but burned all summer long, his sad eyes of no certain colour, his crooked jubilant teeth. He grinned proudly but nervously, stood uncertain for a moment, then touched her elbow and kissed her cheek. 'God you look great,' he said, 'rolling along with that farm-girl gait, your big feet wobbling away in heels.'
Her heart relaxed. No one else saw her this way. She came from Seattle and this made her in Jerry's eyes a farm-girl. It was true, she had always felt uneasy in the East. There was a kind of Eastern woman, Ruth [his wife] for example, who never bothered with makeup or conspicuously flirted and beside whom Sally felt clumsy. Richard noticed this and tried to analyze her insecurity. Jerry noticed and called her his girl in calico. Not since before her father had died, on a trip to San Francisco, had she felt, what she supposed all children are supposed to feel, that it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself."