{"id":376,"date":"2012-01-13T17:54:37","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T15:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=376"},"modified":"2012-01-13T17:54:37","modified_gmt":"2012-01-13T15:54:37","slug":"reading-average-books-i-rafael-yglesiass-a-happy-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/01\/13\/reading-average-books-i-rafael-yglesiass-a-happy-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"READING \u2018AVERAGE\u2019 BOOKS (I): RAFAEL YGLESIAS\u2019S A HAPPY MARRIAGE<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this and the following entry I\u2019d like to write about two very different books I\u2019ve been reading for academic purposes, in one case connected with teaching and in the other with the search for a topic linked to a conference. You\u2019ll see why.<\/p>\n

I chose Rafael Yglesias\u2019s novel A Happy Marriage<\/em> (2009) for my MA course on gender issues as I wanted to include a story about marriage itself, something not so easy to find. I was actually spurred by that poignant moment in Nick Hornby\u2019s High Fidelity<\/em> in which the narrator, Rob, acknowledges that he cannot fully commit to his relationship with his girlfriend Laura because he\u2019s too cowardly to eventually face her death. He imagines Laura dying of cancer and, well, sadly this is exactly what happened to Rafael Yglesias\u2019s wife of 30 years. <\/p>\n

Seeking to overcome his grief and bereavement, Yglesias narrates in his autobiographical novel the first three and the last three weeks of their \u2018happy\u2019 marriage, using a title which he describes as \u201cneither ironical nor sincere.\u201d The novel is cleverly structured so that the beginning and the end of their story occupy alternating chapters. The author himself indicates in an interesting TV interview (see http:\/\/www.pctv76.org\/show.php?epid=169<\/a>) that despite the sincerity with which he portrayed himself even at his worst, this novel should not be approach in a \u201cgossipy\u201d spirit, as he aimed at telling \u201cthe truth\u201d of human experience, and not just of his own. Interestingly, he set out to tell a story of a long romantic relationship but realised that this could only be told if a member of the couple had died. Yes, in fiction we need closure and this is what the female protagonist\u2019s harrowing decay and death provide.<\/p>\n

The novel is, as you may imagine, both moving and exasperating. Amazon.com readers value it highly and I can\u2019t say I regret having included it in the course. In the end, however, apart from contributing plenty to our discussion about the lack of stories dealing with long-standing relationships \u2013the ones assumed to be happy\u2013 Yglesias\u2019s novel turned out to be particularly useful as an example of not quite successful quality literary fiction. We\u2019d gone through Annie E. Proulx\u2019s brilliant \u201cBrokeback Mountain,\u201d Sarah Waters\u2019s sparkling Tipping the Velvet<\/em>, Nick Hornby\u2019s candidly confessional High Fidelity<\/em> and Sophie Kinsella\u2019s truly bad Can you Keep a Secret?<\/em> with considerable critical self-assuredness. A Happy Marriage<\/em> presented us, though, with the very interesting critical challenge of having to point out what exactly was wrong with it. In the end, we more or less agreed that the author sounded too smug, too self-centred to give the dying heroine enough presence and that, at too many points, his prose was too pretentious, yet we also felt oddly callous to be criticising someone\u2019s style in a book that is so personal. On the other hand, one of my students did worry indeed that she was being taken in and that all Yglesias wanted was to cash in onto his wife\u2019s awful death… an ugly suspicion…<\/p>\n

As Yglesias includes so much about his own literary career in this novel, A Happy Marriage<\/em> can also be read as a document regarding the life of the average American writer today. I mean the writer that perhaps should be called \u2018mediocre\u2019 but who is good enough to have been around for decades thanks to the loyalty of his or her readers. Perhaps we focus too often on the major living figures and the classics and forget that there\u2019s a whole army of writers just getting by, struggling to write their best even though that might not be good enough to interest scholars in generating bibliography about them. And they must be the majority. I don\u2019t think Yglesias, judging from this novel, will make it to the history books about contemporary US Literature yet, having found his book relevant though hardly pleasing given its subject matter, I can only wonder at how many other writers have been lost for us in, as the clich\u00e9 goes, the mists of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this and the following entry I\u2019d like to write about two very different books I\u2019ve been reading for academic purposes, in one case connected with teaching and in the other with the search for a topic linked to a conference. You\u2019ll see why. I chose Rafael Yglesias\u2019s novel A Happy Marriage (2009) for my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-teaching-tools-and-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}