The Pavilion of Former Wives

October 10, 2016
Experimental writer Baumbach (You, or the Invention of Memory) here works 14 variations on a narrow theme, some more successful than others. In nearly all the stories, an aging protagonist has moved through several wives and is trying to make sense of relationships that have begun to blur together. Sometimes, that blurring is the subject of the narrative, as in the touching and unsettling “Seattle,” in which an older couple argue “as if the terrifying unimaginable were at stake, over something that had happened (or had not happened) fifteen years back,” while finding it hard to remember what happened an hour or two ago. More often, the women seem to be simply placeholders in the emotional life of men who find it hard to distinguish between “a former wife” and “a former former wife.” Variations include a wry account of four disintegrating marital therapy sessions in “Acting Out,” a caustically comic exchange of letters occasioned by a personal ad in “The New York Review of Love,” and “The Story,” an unsuccessful metanarrative short story composed of a single sentence. Some of the tales are structured around dreams, which makes for some off-putting drifts into the surreal.