Search - The Dangerous Husband : A Novel

In The Dangerous Husband, Jane Shapiro's witty, dark, brilliantly funny novel, they meet and almost immediately fall in love. Like everyone, they have been alone. He is perfect for her-charming and sexy and awkward and sweet. They are forty; it is time for them to marry and shelter each other.

When the honeymoon ends, as honeymoons always do, real life begins, with its surprises. He trips up stairs, falls going down. He cooks a tasty dinner and the kitchen ends up looking like a slaughterhouse. Absorbed in sexual experimentation, he shatters the coffee table. He tenderly wrenches her neck; he breaks her arm. "It was turning out that my husband's dishevelment was incomparable, potent, ramifying. It could destroy whole little worlds." It will surely destroy her. Unless she can kill him first. This is a mordant, glittering novel about our preoccupation with romantic love and about the entanglements of marriage-about the longings and terrors, the erotic lives, the lonelinesses and collusion of couples. As ingenious as it is heartbreaking, The Dangerous Husband is a comic masterpiece, the story of a marriage that is not, after all, exactly like everyone else's. Or is it?