Books: A Terrible Nudity

A SEA CHANGE by J. R. Salamanca. 501 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

“Marriage is a desperate thing,” wrote the 17th century English jurist John Selden. Three centuries later, after 13 years of seeming marital bliss, the two main characters in J. R. Salamanca’s superb new novel suddenly discover what complex anguish Selden had in mind.

On the surface, Michael and Margaret Pritchard are a rather ordinary childless couple. He is a shy, fairly dull curator of manuscripts at the Library of Congress, apparently content with an orderly retreat from life among the works of long dead poets. She is a good-looking, sensitive, sometimes witty middle-aged woman with a crippled hand from a childhood bout with polio. She feels his passion has waned, and wants more excitement in her life. He feels caged by the demands of her love. That worm in the bud eats at their inner emotional lives. Their affectionate love slowly evolves from gentle innocence and idealism toward self-knowledge and final corruption.

Salamanca, 45, teaches English at the University of Maryland. He explored the theme of troubled love under widely different and far more dramatic circumstances in his first two novels, The Lost Country and Lilith. Just because the Pritchards are so ordinary, the corruption wrought by self-knowledge in A Sea Change is more ironic and profound. In an attempt to provoke a return to the freshness of their early love, the Pritchards torment each other in various subtle as well as insidious ways—until nothing is left of their marriage.

Part of their courtship was spent aboard a yacht on Chesapeake Bay, so the Pritchards decide to recapture the essence of their romance by taking a three-month vacation on Cap Ferrat on the French Mediterranean. There, surrounded by a group of sybaritic international degenerates, Michael has an intense sexual bout with an English actress and, wittingly or unwittingly, hires an Italian gigolo to teach Margaret French and other things. What they both learn is what destroys them.

Margaret writes in a letter: “What is it that we’ve injured or violated in each other? Have we found out things about each other that even the other doesn’t know, or want to know, or to have known? Or are we full of fear and trembling before the final, entire, terrible nudity that real marriage requires of us?”

Although the marriage ends with Margaret’s disappearance from Cap Ferrat, it lives on in Michael’s mind, recounted and reflected upon there in a sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, often tender and usually elegiac tone. By using the erudite Michael as his narrator, J. R. Salamanca succeeds in finding an appropriate vehicle for his insights and his fluid poetic prose. Few writers have shown so perceptively that love and marriage are not as simply connected as the horse and carriage.