Divorce Trial

A truth for our times is that some enraged genius is out there at this very moment, bloodying the keys of a word processor and hacking out the Moby Dick of divorce novels. But if only 50% of U.S. marriages end in divorce, why does it seem that 75% of new novels obsess on this deadly subject? Theodore Weesner is the latest good writer to prove that maundering in print about the nasty process of getting shucked is less likely to be entertaining than novelizing about salmonella.

The hero of his umbrous novel Novemberfest (Knopf; 386 pages; $24) is Glen Cady, a 50-year-old professor of German whose young wife Paige goes septic after he is rejected for tenure at his New Hampshire university. Glen is a decent fellow. He was an assembly-line worker in Detroit as a young man, before he quit and revived an interest in the German language begun when he was a soldier in Europe. Paige is petulant and self-absorbed. She disapproves of his besotted love for their four-year-old daughter ("so working class") and grumps when he has a perfectly understandable affair with a pretty grad student.

Author Weesner, a professor of German at the University of New Hampshire, tries to air out his novel with long, wistful passages recounting Glen's bittersweet entanglement with a married German woman when he was a young soldier. These sections work as a love story but, told in retrospect, simply point toward the hero in sour middle age. Scenes of the Berlin Wall coming down are clumsily atmospheric; East Germany is free and Glen at last has his divorce, but the connection is stagy. Maybe the moral is, Write about what you know, sure, except if what you know is that your wife's lawyer is a lizard, take the day off and worm the dog.