I actually had never head of this book before, but I know that my wife and my mother in law (and my sister in law) have read and love Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking. I found this at the library sale and their connection, plus its role in one of the Joe Hill stories from his new collection Full Throttle made it an obvious buy.
It’s a charming book about two couples starting off their life together. We begin meeting Vinny and Guido, two third cousins who don’t actually have a lot of Italian ancestry living their pretty regular bohemian mid-20s male American lives, when they started getting their respective itches for a more settled life. Each meets their future wife in the kinds of ways that people meet people and they start to form their bonds, their lives, and then their stabilities, through various ups and downs.
What strikes me about this book is that it feels very 1980s, but it’s from the 1970s. The effect of this is a novel in which we aren’t dealing with people deciding, almost on a whim, to marry the first serious boyfriend/girlfriend in their lives, or that weird thing that happens in a lot of novels and movies, and which is totally alien to me, marriage as the social goal, but not as the logical extension of a relationship, so that people are dating others up until they decide to be engaged.
So this is a book, an early, although not earliest example, of the more considered way of relationships that is more familiar now, as good on their own, and possibly auditions for a future life, but more explorations of self and life and love. And it’s charmingly written too.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Happy-All-Time-Laurie-Colwin-ebook/dp/B00O1E3YHM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=happy+all+the+time&qid=1573130946&sr=8-1)