SOURCE: "Designs for Living," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4587, January 3, 1991, p. 21.

In the following review of the expanded edition of Happenstance, Armstrong discusses the significance of daily events in the lives of the two characters.

The two novellas between the covers of Happenstance are arranged so that which story you read first is a matter of chance. Whichever end of the book you start with will actually be a beginning. The stories are not arranged as a sequence, but read from front to back and from back to front of the book, so that their endings converge in the middle, printed upside down to one another. Likewise, the histories of Jack Bowman and his wife, Brenda, nouveau middle-class Americans from middle America, both in their forties, converge at O'Hare Airport, Chicago, after they have been away from one another for a week.

Domestic rules, like the form of...