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Product Description
Product Description
Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacable revenge, she naturally turns to her brazen friend Baba for help. But Baba, the bored trophy wife of builder Frank, vulgarly flashing his wealth and ignorance to the world, has her own problems without Kate drooping self-pityingly over her. And both women find unsuspected qualities in themselves as they learn to face reality.
About the Author
Edna O'Brien is the author of 24 books. She was the winner of the 1993 Writers' Guild Prize for Fiction. In 2001 her novel, In the Forest - about a brutal murder on the west coast - caused a furore throughout Ireland and was the subject of a BBC Omnibus film.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
The novel ends on a weirdly hopeful note
16 April 2011
Format:Paperback
Edna O'Brien's ironically-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss picks up a few years after The Lonely Girls, the second novel in her Country Girls trilogy. Kate and Baba are now both married and living in London, and for the first time Baba narrates a portion of the story in the cynical, wise-cracking voice one would expect from knowing her in the other two novels. Baba has married a loud, vulgar and rich builder named Frank, and Kate has married her older lover, Eugene, and borne him a son.
SPOILER ALERT:
Over the course of the novel, Baba will also bear a daughter from an adulterous coupling, endure occasional beatings from her husband, and wind up his caregiver after he suffers a disabling stroke. Over the course of the novel, Kate will leave Eugene, struggle to create a separate home where she can have her son at least part time, and lose the boy entirely when his father flees to Fiji with the child. Despite the tragedies Baba and Kate suffer, the novel ends on a weirdly hopeful note, with Kate undergoing sterilization after carving out a life for herself that's not 100-percent dependent on a man and Baba surprised to discover that Frank's neediness has allowed her to recognize for the first time the true affection she has for him. Unfortunately, the 1986 edition of the trilogy contains an epilogue that struck me as truly bizarre. Baba is waiting at Waterloo for the arrival of a train bearing Kate's coffin. In the intervening years, Kate regained custody of her son -- now a student at Harvard -- and found success with a bookshop outside London, but following the collapse of another relationship with a married man, she checked into a health spa where she drowned in the pool, an "accident" that Baba presumes is suicide. Why, having made a success of her life, would Kate kill herself over a man when for many, many years when she was most definitely NOT a success she managed to survive the failure of her love affairs without doing herself in. My advice to readers: Read the novels as written in the 1960s and ignore the epilogue written two decades later.
SPOILER ALERT:
Over the course of the novel, Baba will also bear a daughter from an adulterous coupling, endure occasional beatings from her husband, and wind up his caregiver after he suffers a disabling stroke. Over the course of the novel, Kate will leave Eugene, struggle to create a separate home where she can have her son at least part time, and lose the boy entirely when his father flees to Fiji with the child. Despite the tragedies Baba and Kate suffer, the novel ends on a weirdly hopeful note, with Kate undergoing sterilization after carving out a life for herself that's not 100-percent dependent on a man and Baba surprised to discover that Frank's neediness has allowed her to recognize for the first time the true affection she has for him. Unfortunately, the 1986 edition of the trilogy contains an epilogue that struck me as truly bizarre. Baba is waiting at Waterloo for the arrival of a train bearing Kate's coffin. In the intervening years, Kate regained custody of her son -- now a student at Harvard -- and found success with a bookshop outside London, but following the collapse of another relationship with a married man, she checked into a health spa where she drowned in the pool, an "accident" that Baba presumes is suicide. Why, having made a success of her life, would Kate kill herself over a man when for many, many years when she was most definitely NOT a success she managed to survive the failure of her love affairs without doing herself in. My advice to readers: Read the novels as written in the 1960s and ignore the epilogue written two decades later.
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