John Updike

Marry Me: a Romance John Updike

Marry Me is subtitled ?A Romance? because, in the author?s words, ?people don?t act like that anymore.? The time is 1962, and the place is a fiefdom of Camelot called Greenwood, Connecticut. Jerry Conant and Sally Mathias are in love and want to get married, though they already are married to others. A diadem of five symmetrical chapters describes the course of their affair as it flickers off and on, and as their spouses react, in a tentative late-summer atmosphere of almost-last chances. For this is, as Jerry observes, ?the twilight of the old morality, and there?s just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in.?