I like the premise of State of the Union: A Marriage in Ten Parts a whole lot: in ten short chapters, set over the course of ten weeks, we see a married couple, Louise and Tom, having a drink at a pub before their weekly couples’ therapy appointment. They’re both in their forties; they have two kids; she’s a gerontologist; he’s an out-of-work music critic. While you learn early on what precipitated these counseling sessions (she had an affair), you also learn, as the book progresses, that there’s obviously more to it than that.
The text is mostly dialogue, and I wonder how my experience would have been different if I’d watched it in its SundanceTV version with Rosamund Pike and Chris O’Dowd rather than reading it. (Part of the reason that I picked up this book is that my boyfriend saw the SundanceTV production at the Tribeca Film Festival back in May and enjoyed it.) I obviously can’t know, but I wonder if seeing it on-screen would have made it feel more character-driven rather than idea-driven, and I wonder if that would have made me like it more or less.
The book felt very idea-driven to me, in a satisfying way: every week Tom and Louise are talking not just about their specific situation and how they ended up where they are, but also about marriage more generally: about different metaphors for marriage and how those can cause problems, about what different people assume a marriage is or means. Is it about sexual exclusivity and sexual desire? Is it about having a family together? What does it mean/does it matter if two people who are married to one another can’t imagine themselves being friends if they weren’t married? Is a marriage like a computer, i.e. a complicated machine that you shouldn’t take apart because you might not be able to put it back together? If you do take it apart, should you try to put it back together even if you can’t make it the same as it was originally? Is being a couple about being “two against the world,” or is it about some other kind of teamwork? What does it mean when someone says they have doubts about a relationship that they’ve been in for over a decade? Is there such a thing as a “new start” in a relationship? What’s the goal of marriage, or is that the wrong question to ask?
Which isn’t to say that this book is all seriousness—it’s also quite funny. I like how Tom and Louise watch other couples leave their therapist’s house (which is just across the street from the pub) and speculate about those couples’ lives; I like how they find out big or small things about each other that make them kind of appalled, and how they react; I like how they joke with each other and work on cryptic crosswords together; I like the pace and humor of their back-and-forth.
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