Andrew Sean Greer is perhaps best known for Less, his Pulitzer-winning comedy about an ageing writer blundering around the globe. I enjoyed Less when I read it back in 2018, but for my money, The Story of a Marriage is the better novel. It’s quieter, more restrained, far more emotionally resonant, and I felt like I gained more insight from it.

Set in 1950s San Francisco, it tells the story of Pearlie Cook, her husband Holland, and the stranger who arrives at their door to unravel the carefully ordered lives they have built together. What begins as a portrait of an unassuming family becomes, revelation by revelation, a study of the secrets, compromises, and half-truths that hold relationships together.

I was swept along by both Greer’s elegant prose and the steady drip of revelations. Each turn added new emotional weight, not just to the plot but to my sense of the characters and the bargains they struck with themselves in order to survive. Pearlie’s voice drew me in: warm and candid at first, but increasingly distant as the novel unfolded. It felt as though the more we understood about the context of her life, the less she resembled a contemporary confidante, and the more she stood as a figure shaped and limited by the societal expectations with which she lived.

Reading this shortly after Nella Larsen’s Passing, I found myself struck by the parallels. Just as Larsen illuminated the personal costs of racial and social conformity in 1920s America, Greer here makes vivid the stifling pressures of the 1950s. In our era of self-expression, we often dwell on the anxieties of exposure; this novel is a reminder of the equally corrosive anxieties of enforced silence.

The Story of a Marriage may not have the wit and sparkle of Less, but its restraint feels exactly right. It’s a novel of quiet devastations, one that lingers not for its cleverness but for its insight into how private lives are warped by public expectations. I finished it with a sense of melancholy admiration — and a conviction that it deserves more recognition than it gets.