That is the gist of Lily Tuck’s strangely captivating little novel, “I Married You For Happiness.” It goes something like this: Nina is making dinner. Philip comes home. “I am a bit tired,” he says. “I am going to lie down for a minute before supper.” She makes the salad, takes the chicken out of the oven, boils the baby potatoes. Eventually, she calls for him to come down. The food is ready; a cork is being stubborn. When he doesn’t come, she goes up to check.
“Before she walks into the bedroom, she knows. . . . She sees his stocking feet.”
This is the story of a single night — a widow’s vigil — when sitting by, as a body loses its essential heat, a woman contemplates her marriage.
Tuck is far enough into her career as a writer that she isn’t wasting her time. She won a National Book Award for “The News from Paraguay”; she was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for “Siam.” She has written a half-dozen books in two decades. She is almost 73 years old. There is little she needs to prove.
Her new novel, as a result, is messy, reckless — a gasping and hurried labor — but imbued with enough heart that anyone who makes it past the first confounding pages will elbow ahead, trying to breathe life into the corpse. Who is the brilliant mathematician who courts his wife in French, prefers sex in the mornings and, in time, becomes a tender father? Who is the irksome, neurotic painter, who betrays her husband even though she adores him, noodles over his theories of probability and obsesses over his long-ago romances?
Tuck, who grew up in South America and has lived in France, Asia — and all across the globe — writes for a worldly cohort. Freighted with foreign references, her prose can be strained and mannered. “Knowledge is the goal of belief” is a typical lumbering pronouncement. Yet she can leap from Paris to Hong Kong with all the glee of a fox after pullets. Her Nina quaffs limoncello, shudders with pudeur and recalls the gardens of Ouro Preto, the capers of Pantelleria.
But as Nina contemplates her dead husband’s math lectures — on amicable numbers, for instance, whose divisors are actually agents of union — the story becomes steadily more absorbing, and the sum of the novel’s parts is well worth the effort. In the world of probability, falling in love, like breaking an eggshell, is a one-way function: Once done, you can’t go back again. You can’t un-mix the paint. Or rebottle the champagne. Or un-have that baby.
You also won’t un-read this odd little book once you’ve finished it. It will make you chafe. It will strike a chord. Like love itself, it is an irritant as well as a comfort. In a way, “I Married You For Happiness” is like the body upstairs in Nina’s house. It weighs; it is deeply sad. It is the ultimate one-way function. But it will also remind you that unlike that shattered egg — at least in human hearts — the dead do have the power to be whole again.
Arana, a writer at large for The Post, is the author of “Cellophane” and “Lima Nights.”
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