Marriages is the other side of the Jamesian tradition: an American chronicle of the quest for European richness, complexity and depth. For Owen, the Middle Western businessman who narrates it, these are all embodied in the blonde, unnamed Englishwoman with whom he betrays his wife on a hypereducated trip … to Paris and Provence. Their love-affair is skilfully told, in a cunning mosaic of shifting flashbacks, but like most such it has to struggle by over-writing against cliché, not wholly successfully. One has drunk this incredible Southern light, tasted these perfect meals à deux, seen these slumbrous, leonine post-coital looks before. Where Straub shows himself a real writer is in evoking the sallow foreground and aftermath Peter (Francis) Straub 1943– © Jerry Bauerto love's exaltations: the sharp, disappointed, comradely wife who falls back on her bitchy sister for company; the lakeshore picnic where Owen first seduced her: their drunken Middle-Western wedding...