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A review by anneliehyatt
Marry Me: A Romance by John Updike
4.0
This is a generous rating for this book, but I have a lot of tenderness for it--for Jerry, for Ruth, for Richard, and I guess even for Sally, all whom I got to know well as I made my way through the book. I also read this, my first Updike book, at a time of tumult--my last finals of my freshman year, an old classmate of mine passed, and I was tying up the lose ends of my social life which did little to fend off my terminal loneliness--and found it strange but somehow comforting to return to these characters through it all.
I was stunned by the beauty of some of the lines of the book, of how real the characters seemed, of the smartness of the dialogue, even through the boringness of the story. This book is a wonderful meditation on real love and how it relates to marriage, adultery, etc. What can real love overcome, and what can it not? Can it overcome our own narcissism, our inability to take control of our fate? I guess what I'm trying to explain is that there is nothing overtly special about this book, but there is something special about it to me. I recommend this book to anyone with a large reserve of patience.
I was stunned by the beauty of some of the lines of the book, of how real the characters seemed, of the smartness of the dialogue, even through the boringness of the story. This book is a wonderful meditation on real love and how it relates to marriage, adultery, etc. What can real love overcome, and what can it not? Can it overcome our own narcissism, our inability to take control of our fate? I guess what I'm trying to explain is that there is nothing overtly special about this book, but there is something special about it to me. I recommend this book to anyone with a large reserve of patience.