Marriage is among the most-written-about and most-evaded subjects in the literary novel. The romantic comedies arrive at the wedding. The divorce dramas arrive at the marriage's collapse. The novels that take marriage seriously as a sustained subject — what it is, what it does to the people inside it, how it changes over time — are rarer than the genre conventions suggest. The five novels below are the ones that have done the work. They are not romance novels and they are not anti-romance novels. They are novels that take a marriage as a long subject and follow it.
1. Stoner by John Williams (1965)
Williams's novel was largely overlooked when it was published and has been reread carefully in the past two decades. The book traces the life of William Stoner, an English professor at the University of Missouri, from his entry into the university as a student through his death several decades later. A central component of the life is his marriage to Edith, which the book treats with a sustained attention that the novel form rarely permits.
The marriage is not a happy one. The book's achievement is to render the unhappiness with the kind of patience that does not become either melodrama or sentimentality. Edith is treated as a person with her own interior life rather than as the obstacle in Stoner's biography. The marriage proceeds, the children come, the silences accumulate, the moments of unexpected tenderness arrive and pass. Williams writes about all of this in the same patient prose that he uses for the academic life and the institutional politics. The novel is short. The novel is exact. Read for the demonstration that a marriage can be a sustained literary subject without the standard dramatic conveniences.
2. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)
Stegner's book is principally a novel about a friendship — two couples who meet as graduate students and remain close across several decades — but the friendship is observed through the two marriages, and the two marriages are observed through the friendship. The book's method is to refuse the standard plot drivers. There are no affairs, no professional collapses of the kind that conventional novels would supply. There is illness, there are children, there are professional setbacks, and there is the long working-out of what these four people are to each other across the decades.
The book is written in the long sentences that Stegner used when he was working at the top of his form. The observation of the two marriages is sustained and patient. The husband-narrator's account of his own marriage to Sally is among the most quietly affectionate marital portraits in twentieth-century American fiction. The book is also a novel about literary ambition, about academic life, about the long arc of friendship between couples — but the marriages are at its centre. Read alongside Stoner for the affirmative complement to Williams's harder portrait.
3. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–1872)
Eliot's novel contains two of the most-careful marital studies in nineteenth-century English fiction. The marriage of Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon is one of the great representations of incompatible idealism colliding with intellectual rigidity. The marriage of Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy is one of the great representations of how the imaginative expectations that people bring to marriage interact with the temperaments they actually possess.
The marriages are not the whole novel. Middlemarch is a large book about a provincial English town and the political, religious, and economic life of its inhabitants. But the marriages are central to the moral substance of the book. Eliot was unusually clear-eyed about what the institution did to the women inside it and what the conventions of the form required of both partners. The novel is long. The novel is one of the books that justifies the realist novel as a form. Read for the demonstration of what fiction can do when it treats marriage with full nineteenth-century seriousness.
4. The Easter Parade by Richard Yates (1976)
Yates's short novel is, formally, a study of two sisters across several decades, but the texture of the book is overwhelmingly about marriages — the unhappy one of the sisters' parents, the early marriage of the older sister Sarah to a man who turns out to be controlling and abusive, the affairs and the failed relationships of the younger sister Emily. The book is the work of a writer whose subject was the specific quality of American mid-century unhappiness and who refused the consolations that the era expected fiction to supply.
The book is short. The book is unsparing. The book's account of Sarah's marriage — observed from Emily's outside vantage but with full novelistic interiority into Sarah's situation — is one of the best things Yates ever wrote. The marriages in the book are not symbolic of anything larger; they are the actual subject. Read in conjunction with Williams for the second example of a marriage rendered without the standard literary dramatics.
5. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)
Eugenides's novel is the contemporary inclusion on the list and earns its place by the self-awareness it brings to the form. The title is exact — the book is about the marriage plot as a literary tradition, and it follows a love triangle through the early 1980s with deliberate awareness of how nineteenth-century English novels would have managed the same material. The book is set partly at Brown University, partly in the early-1980s East Coast literary world, partly in India where one of the characters works in a Mother Teresa context.
The intelligence of the book is in its negotiation between the inherited form and the contemporary material. Eugenides knows what Middlemarch did and asks what a novel about a marriage and its alternatives can do in a period when the marriage plot has been retired by the prevailing literary culture. The book's answer is patient and observant. The marriage at the centre of the novel is treated with the seriousness the inherited form would expect, with the contemporary frankness that the inherited form did not permit. Read last as the contemporary engagement with the tradition that the previous four books contributed to.
Five novels, then, on the long subject — Williams on the patient rendering of unhappiness, Stegner on the affirmative side of the same form, Eliot on the foundational nineteenth-century work, Yates on the unsparing American mid-century version, and Eugenides on the contemporary engagement with the tradition. Marriage is a harder subject for fiction than the genre conventions suggest. These five novels are among the books that have done the work.
