Adultery

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a tart and entertaining treatise on adultery, Hunter College professor DeSalvo (Writing as a Way of Healing) offers sometimes dueling perspectives based on personal experience and objective curiosity. Fueled by the memory of her husband's infidelity during the early years of their marriage and by her own indiscretions with respect to former boyfriends, the author seeks to examine why people cheat and why they then love to talk and write about their perfidy. Written in a breezy, stream-of-consciousness style, the book is more than a social critique. It also serves as a portrait of a marriage that has survived adultery, as a memoir of growing up under the threat of a father's violent outbursts and as an exploration of adultery's prominence in literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to the Kinsey report. DeSalvo leaps from her husband to Colette, from minor anecdotes to major hypotheses, without sacrificing clarity or sincerity. The work is tied together by literature just as, DeSalvo speculates, adultery binds its participants through the process of storytelling. She stirs the still-smoldering embers of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as proof that Americans love a good story--and all the more if it involves sexual indiscretion. In attempting to map the "uncharted and often unpredictable emotional terrain" of adultery, she provides an intelligent and thought-provoking inquiry into why sexual infidelity will always fascinate us. Agent, Geri Thoma, Elaine Markson Literary Agency. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The myths and details of infidelity--the stolen kiss, the home shattered by a younger woman, the afternoon tryst that repeats over the course of years, and the passionate awakening brought on by a forbidden love--are the stuff of great literature and changed lives. In this swift, engaging literary memoir, DeSalvo (Breathless) retells her own adultery story (her husband's affair almost destroyed their then young marriage) as she examines adultery in literature and public life, from Dante to Wharton and Woolf and from Waller to Lewinsky. These stories, and the lives behind them, full of "yearning, loss, desire, sorrow, autonomy--are...the fundamental bedrock of the chastened human soul." And they fascinate and compel us even as they disgust or frighten us. DeSalvo's moving literary exploration is great preparation for her real work: resolving the betrayal in her own marriage. She confronts the complex issues of longing, loyalty, and fragile but persistent autonomy with vigor, ultimately reinterpreting the nature and purpose of this lifelong union. Recommended for public libraries.--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

As the nation emerges from its obsession with the Monica Lewinsky affair, DeSalvo reflects on adultery's positive and negative effects on marriage.