Description
Duplicity is a skill that is required in even the happiest of marriages - a state the couples in Angela Huth's slyly witty comedy of manners and morals are still hoping to attain. Their skills in pretense and the rich variety of their affairs, imagined and real, weave an elaborate web that will leave the reader amazed, amused, and enthralled. After years of marriage to bad-tempered, overweight Thomas, Rachel is reduced to dreams of shopping sprees in the mid-afternoon, until she decides one evening to "signal availability" at a stuffy university dinner to disastrous results. Her oblivious husband, meanwhile, manages to break off one dull affair only to fall head over heels in love with a reclusive stranger's paintings. Then there are the Farthingoes, whose marital distance is measured as much by his fascination with the nighttime habits of badgers as by her immersion in the details of the grand ball to which all our heroes are invited and which she approaches with the fervor of Zeffirelli on the stage of La Scala. At the Farthingoes' ball, all the invitees are brought together in weal and in woe, in joy and in sorrow, for better and for worse. With compassion and intelligence, Huth captures the foibles of her often misguided but all-too-human characters, as they converge in a delightful midnight climax to find their hopes and desires unexpectedly transformed.
