Kirkus评论

Twenty-plus years of marital recap by eleven who threw in the towel--and mostly a bit of a yawn. For one thing, the authors--a family counselor and a science writer--seem to have stacked the deck: their subjects tell embarrassingly similar stories, leading up to a neat concluding chapter on trends in mid-life separation or divorce. Whether roused by cancer, a coronary, or the deaths of loved ones, the men were generally the catalysts of the breakup: they saw their mortality and got out before the parade could pass them by (pausing only long enough to initiate some hot extramarital affairs). The women, meanwhile, were standing on the brink of independence after more than two decades of being primarily wife and mother; but that seldom made the pain of rejection any easier (witness Kate, who after nine months of separation from her gadabout husband still comes running when he phones for a date). The marriages generally exhibited deep-seated problems--sex, communication, drinking, ""grievance stockpiling,"" and ""intellectual and emotional distancing""--which constitute formidable obstacles in any relationship; the accountings here, however, entail endless repetition of the man's restless search, the woman's gradual awakening to something amiss, her upset at the discovery of an affair, and her yearning to have her spouse back. Another limiting factor is the concentration on middle-and upper-middle class couples. For a better insight into a couple's handling of the man's philandering, see James and Peggy Vaughan's Beyond Affairs (below). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.