Private Acts

By Paul Gray

A MARRIED MAN by Piers Paul Read Lippincott; 264 pages; $10.95

The simplest moral of this quiet, affecting novel might be: Don't Read Tolstoy. John Strickland, 40, is a successful London barrister who casually picks up The Death of Ivan Ilych during an August retreat at the home of his wife's parents. The lawyer finds himself deeply rattled by the Tolstoy hero's mounting despair, especially by the question Ilych asks himself: "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?" Querying himself in the same manner, Strickland realizes that he loathes his career, the expensive trappings of his upper-middle-class existence and his marriage of twelve years.

Such mid-life crises threaten to become as much a cliche in literature as they are in life. Yet Piers Paul Read, 38, puts a lot of his native English on this familiar pitch. He knows, as most chroniclers of Me Decade shenanigans do not, that private acts have public consequences; in the great tradition of British novelists, he draws society as a delicate, vast spider web, tuned to vibrate at the lightest footfall or breath of scandal. In addition, Read is a self-described "serious Catholic" and scales this novel to dimensions familiar to readers of Graham Greene: his hero's quest for fulfillment progresses not only as an item of gossip but as a spectacle under the cold eye of eternity.

The ensuing judgment, not surprisingly, is unfavorable. During the winter of 1973-74, with the English unions and the Conservative government locked in strikes and threats, Strickland becomes active in Labor Party politics, on the side all his well-to-do friends detest. He thinks he is rekindling the socialist torch he carried when young, but his wife Clare scalds him: "You're addicted to your own self-importance and like a real junkie you need bigger and bigger doses to keep going." Strickland also becomes embroiled in an affair with an enormously rich young woman and realizes, belatedly, that she thinks he will break up his home for her. He argues to himself that her impression never came from him: "He might have had daydreams of Clare's demise but he had never thought of leaving her, with or without the children."

Daydreaming about the death of a spouse is a punishable offense in the world of this novel, particularly when the dreamer has a girlfriend with limitless funds and a small portfolio of scruples. When Clare does indeed die violently, Strickland and the London police seem curiously unwilling to suspect the one person who had most to gain from the murder.

A Married Man coasts over this pothole in its plot because of its cushion of intelligence and moral fastidiousness. Author Read is best known in the U.S. as the author of Alive, a nonfiction account of how some Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash in the Andes resorted to cannibalism to survive; his six previous novels, far less sensational, deserve more readers than they have received, and his latest may be his best. No one now writing has achieved quite the same equipoise between malaise and morality, ideas and emotions. In this tale of human imperfectibility, the devil gets his due and not a scintilla more. -- Paul Gray

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