i married you for happiness

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck (Atlantic Monthly, 2011)

An exquisite, beautiful book, a real delight to read and savor.  After forty-two years of marriage, a husband dies suddenly after coming home from work — he’s a professor of mathematics.  He dies before dinner can be served, and his wife, Nina, stays by his body all night long, keeping a vigil and allowing herself to float back through the memories she has of their (mostly) happy, golden marriage: meeting as young lovers in Paris, living in stimulating and upscale academic communities in Berkeley and Cambridge (MA), vacationing (sailing) on beautiful islands in the Mediterranean, and raising their lovely daughter.  The book celebrates this golden life not by relying upon its surface charm and beauty but by always gently evoking the love that lies beneath that surface, the love that holds these two sympathetic and interesting people so surely together.  The writing is Salteresque: the form fragmented and mosaical.  An  unusual, personal (one feels), and very beautiful book.