A Married Man

"I keep talking about this book, hoping that someone will reissue it; it is out of print, and I mention it because of that. First of all, it’s a wonderful novel. It is elegantly plotted and it’s about serious stuff – about a lawyer in London who’s turning 40 and about the approach of middle age. Obviously, some of the themes resemble those in my own books, which is probably what enhances my appreciation for it. He’s drawn into an affair and… I don’t want to say too much about it and ruin it. And oddly they made a British movie about it, I think it was made for television, and the movie was also quite good. But you know the whole thing has dropped from the scene, and so, all things being equal, I choose to mention it to remind people that this is a really good novel. Melville of course did that much more overtly and much more symbolically. Melville was kind of a Marxist before Marx, and he saw the world in terms of this great clash of ideas and values. And he saw the American dilemma of trying to deal with commercialism, which he saw consistently as soul destroying. Piers Paul Reid is not writing on as large a canvas; he’s just trying to compare the moral crisis in one man’s life with the decline in the country."