Books: ‘The Astral’ by Kate Christensen

“The Astral” is largely a rumination on marriage, wise enough to inform anyone who’s been at it a while but maybe too dark for kids just starting off. As Harry rides his bicycle around Brooklyn — wonderfully drawn here — he reflects on what went wrong in his home. He did have an affair 12 years ago, and ever since he’s had “a scarlet P on [his] forehead — for Philanderer, alas, not Pimpernel.” But he always assumed their shared experience was enough to keep Luz — “my fellow grizzled veteran of the same wars — and him together till the end. “Through the decades, things had gotten dirty between us,” he admits, “corrupted by familiarity, the pain we caused each other on purpose and by accident, our blind spots, all the things we couldn’t say or see. By now, I felt so many complicated, ancient, powerful things for and about Luz, a mishmash of memories and associations and anger and irritation and physical knowledge and attachment and blind habit and nostalgia and dependency and intertwined roots, I wasn’t sure it could all be lumped together as love or any other one word.”

Swinging between ribald confession and thoughtful reflection with a hair shirt grafted to his torso, Harry is an endlessly engaging coroner of his relationship with Luz, that “one-woman fascistic government,” but the novel rounds out its exploration of marriage with several other curious couplings. He and his best female friend wonder why they never had that affair that Harry’s wife assumes they’ve been having. His male friends seem locked in cold, competitive marriages, and his own adult children aren’t at all interested in the matrimonial model their parents pursued: His daughter, a lesbian freegan, seems too serious for romance, while his wastrel son is caught up in a religious cult that uses love as a con.

GoingOut Guide

Looking for things to do?

Select one or more criteria to search

Anything Events Bars & Club Events Book Events Exhibits Food Events Miscellaneous Events Music Events Performing Arts Sports Events Movies Locations Bars & Clubs City Services Hotels Miscellaneous Locations Movie Theaters Museums Music Venues Restaurants Sports Locations Stores Theaters Anytime Today This Weekend Next 7 Days Opening Soon Closing Soon Anywhere in D.C. area D.C. U Street The Mall Tenleytown Takoma SW Waterfront Other Southwest Other Southeast Other Northwest Other Northeast Logan Circle Georgetown Foggy Bottom Dupont Circle Downtown Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant Cleveland Park/Woodley Park Chinatown Chevy Chase Capitol Hill Brookland Anacostia Adams Morgan Maryland St. Mary's County Prince George's County Montgomery County Howard County Greater Maryland Frederick County Charles County Calvert County Baltimore Anne Arundel County Virginia Prince William County Loudoun County Greater Virginia Fauquier County Fairfax County Arlington County Alexandria

Kid-friendly

Free admission

Get ideas

Those side stories dress up the plot, but the heart of the novel remains Harry working out his own salvation, trying to figure out in late middle age what it means to be a man, a married man, a selfish man, a thoughtful, good man — roles that many of us are trying to play all at once.

If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a female author could create such a sympathetic male narrator trying to placate his harridan of a wife. (There’s a poisonous female therapist here, too, “a stuck-up stone-faced shamanistic manipulator.”) Imagine the blowback that Updike, Irving or Roth would have suffered — have suffered! — for lines like this:

“That was marriage, sometimes. Wives got their husbands under control and kept them there. That was how they operated, these possessive, manipulative, needy, controlling women, they pretended to be soft and vulnerable, sweet and loving, and we, big dumb dogs that we were, fell for their cooing flattery and breasty softness, tried to be the heroes they wanted us to be, to live up to their expectations. And when we failed and our wives lashed out, we skulked around, tails between legs, hangdog and furtive, doing their bidding until they forgave us, if they did.”

That’s not Christensen speaking through a mask, ironically or otherwise. That’s a passionate, sexist, loving, complex man named Harry Quirk. Alive, like us. Go meet him.

Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.

THE ASTRAL

By Kate Christensen

Doubleday.

311 pp. $25.95