The book begins: "We think we know the ones we love." The rest of the book (just under 200 pages) explores this statement as well as the idea that as we realize that we don't, in fact, really know the ones we love, we assume they know us. We seem to miss the fact that we aren't more readily known than our loves.
Greer manages to pull off the voice of a black woman in 1953 San Francisco with little trouble. The novel is in her voice the whole time and it isn't labored. He allows her to slip back inside her mind, directly addressing her husband when she gets to a part of the story that hurts her heart, and allows her digressions that seem completely natural. And, most important to the conceit of the novel, he doesn't allow her omniscience. She has the luxury of hindsight because she's telling the story after the events have occurred but she doesn't get caught in the quagmire of nostalgia or regret and she doesn't know what the other characters are thinking. She, and consequently the reader, are genuinely surprised when the secrets are resolved--not a groundshaking surprise but the sort of quiet, that makes sense surprise. Greer doesn't mangle his characters to make their lives more interesting for our consumption. He just lets them live.
The plot seems fairly simple: a young housewife with a young son in 1953 learns something new and troubling about the husband she thought she knew so well. The remainder of the novel centers around her trying to simultaneously keep and alter her life to fit this new knowledge.
Greer's writing doesn't seem genius to me. I wasn't awestruck. But I was captivated. I read the book in just over 24 hours, reading half in one sitting and the other in one more. He has a talent for making you want to read the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next chapter, all without cheesy suspense or contrived cliff hangers.
It's a good, solid book about race, sexuality, gender, and war not to mention marriage and knowing the ones you love.
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