"Marry Me" by John Updike (1977)

If Nature abhors a vacuum, religious thought fills it. Religion cannot be blamed for deficiencies in one's character though. It is one's character that chooses to accept religion in the first place. So, the book is not about the paralysing effect of religion.

The characters are casualties of the suburban life style of the mid-twentieth century, in which a house-wife lacking a day job fulfils her ambitions by pursuing a day lover. The day lover, having outsourced his reason to the absentee God and a partial spouse, mistrusts and misjudges his feelings, and hence, is unable to make decisions. He seeks inevitability by taking a seat amid the audience, only occasionally interrupting the Life's performance by shouting at characters, in full confidence that they do not---should not---hear and would not---must not---heed his remarks.

There is certain mutual disrespect in the characters' habit of enunciating aloud to each other their emotionally charged thoughts. The creativity of individuality is lost in such a chatter. Respect is lost too; whereas if love survives, it loses its object by blurring the boundaries between oneself, the other, and the others. "In their willingness to live in parallel lay their weakness and their strength." The honesty of the characters' conversations stems not from trust or strength, but from the desire to renounce all responsibility for what happens---to the other and to oneself---by arming the other with all information.

Jerry is attracted to Sally because, living apart, they are not given to the continuous utilitarian chatter. Hence, Jerry perceives Sally as a distinct object of his desire---distinct from himself and his family. Sally seems much more real than his wife because, not being his suburban wife, she does not shadow his every step and thought; she is unpredictable and therefore alive.

The theme of death is the theme of indecisiveness. Jerry feels dying. Immersed in the routine of producing children and steady income, he is stripped of any need to make decisions. His wife, Ruth, accepts Jerry's indecisiveness, thereby becoming an accomplice in his dying. He despises her for that. Sally is the only domain of his life that contains ambiguity, room for deciding. But she would not have him dead, the state to which she feels that he would revert, once settled into the routine of being with her.

"The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire."

The prose is succinct, the sentences are short, the observations are precise, and no points are belaboured.

An advantage of seeing the story related on the pages of a paperback, as opposed to being projected onto a screen, is that the reader can invest the characters with more subtlety than would have been disbursed to them by a film director, who would invariably seek the sensationalism of the grotesque. One can also imagine the protagonists as youthful spirits, not infantile ones. The latter, perhaps, is a more truthful representation.