This Story Will Change: After the Happily Ever After

In this inventive-to-a-fault memoir, novelist Crane (The History of Great Things) recounts the fragmentation of her marriage in the third person. The unnamed characters are defined by roles: the husband, the wife, the bud (an old friend who becomes the wife’s roommate), and the kid (the bud’s teenage daughter). The husband and wife meet in Chicago through AA: he’s in his 20s and newly sober, she’s a decade in the program and in her early 40s. They move frequently (Chicago, Texas, Brooklyn) to support his art career, then settle in an anonymous “historic city” in upstate New York. The husband undertakes window restoration for neighbors; the wife writes, teaches, and ruminates. He suggests an open marriage (she flatly refuses), then has an affair with a client. Wealthy friends offer the wife their Manhattan pied-à-terre, and the bud joins with the kid in tow. The trio form an accidental, affectionate family that restores the wife to hope. Events are told in short chapters, a mosaic of loosely linear scenes embedded with flashbacks. The rare first-person chapters are Crane’s most incisive moments; the formula elsewhere has a distancing effect and begins to drag. Readers will wish Crane’s vulnerable and revealing moments weren’t held captive behind the artifice of style. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Nagger Literary. (Aug.)