Two painfully memorable moments anchor "Monogamy," a sophisticated, melancholy novel about an American family that some would call dysfunctional, others awkwardly recognizable and sympathetic.
In the first, Annie, an introspective photographer, awakens before dawn one day in the mid-2000s in her shabby, comfortable home in Cambridge, Mass., to find Graham, her 57-year-old second husband of more than 30 years, lying cold and "yellowish gray" next to her.
It's a spooky scene, and one that unfolds well into the book, after we've come to know this couple and the tricky choreography of their marriage.
Weeks later, Annie, still deeply shaken, summons the strength to arrange a memorial service for Graham at the bustling bookstore he co-owns. Afterward, she invites the mourners to her house.
Late that evening, she goes upstairs to use the bathroom and hears an eerie keening coming from Graham's study. Thinking at first that it is their adult daughter, Sarah, she heads there.
It is not Sarah, she realizes in a moment "of confusion, and then of sudden clarity." It is a woman she barely knows, sobbing her heart out at her husband's desk. The woman "turned toward the open doorway, her face lifted to Annie, ravaged by grief, sorrow, and then quickly something else. Guilt. Apology."
Her husband's lover.
The discovery that Graham, a large, cheerful, broad-souled man, had a very recent affair curdles Annie's grief. She does not wish to share her intensely private rage and anguish with Sarah, or with her husband's son by his first marriage, Lucas. But she does tell her husband's first wife, Frieda, who through the years has become one of Annie's closest friends.
