Books: Married Enemies

STRANGERS (174 pp.)—Albert Memmi —Orion ($3.50).

Most of the endless flow of novels about broken marriages rest on a few well-tried fictional supports: the triangle, intrusion of job or career, incapacity to keep loving, failure to communicate. Most such books read as if they were inspired by the stale, paid advice of a marriage counselor. In Strangers, Tunisian Novelist Albert Memmi writes with relentless can dor of a far grimmer marital crack-up in a far more ferocious setting than is usually found in the bored, semi-Freudian cold war between American husbands and wives. If Author Memmi's lovers never have a chance, it...