O My DarlingO My Darling

The marriage of a high-school guidance counselor, Clark, and bookkeeper, Charlotte, is tested by their richly complex private lives, their backgrounds, and the rescue of a young boy whose presence reveals vulnerabilities in the marriage.
The marriage of a high-school guidance counselor, Clark, and bookkeeper, Charlotte, is tested by their richly complex private lives, their backgrounds, and the rescue of a young boy whose presence reveals vulnerabilities in the marriage. A first novel.
O My Darling tells the story of a devoted young couple whose marriage beings to implode when they move into their first house. The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a secretary, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys, and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. Even their cherished yellow "dream" house seems permeated with the quiet sorrows and restless discontents of its previous owners. When Clark rescues a young boy from drowning, a chain of events - some comic, some harrowing - is set in motion, revealing the fault lines of the couple's marriage and individual psyches.
A dazzling literary debut, O My Darling explores the quiet joys and staggering mysteries of love in elegant, magical prose. O My Darling tells the story of a devoted young couple whose marriage begins to implode when they move into their first house. The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a bookkeeper, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. When Clark rescues a young boy from drowning, a chain of eventssome comic, some harrowingis set in motion, revealing the fault lines of the couple's marriage and individual psyches. Amity Gaige is a consummate stylist. Her every sentence contains a tiny worldmarrying striking images to deep, soulful ideas in perfectly concise fashion. Her cool, slightly off-kilter sensibility expressed in spare, lucid prose will remind readers of Paula Fox (Desperate Characters), while her pure, hyper-real vision of suburban America places her among the most talented of the generation of writers dubbed "the children of Cheever."
O My Darling tells the story of a devoted young couple whose marriage begins to implode when they move into their first house. The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a bookkeeper, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. When Clark rescues a young boy from drowning, a chain of events—some comic, some harrowing—is set in motion, revealing the fault lines of the couple's marriage and individual psyches.

Amity Gaige is a consummate stylist. Her every sentence contains a tiny world—marrying striking images to deep, soulful ideas in perfectly concise fashion. Her cool, slightly off-kilter sensibility expressed in spare, lucid prose will remind readers of Paula Fox (Desperate Characters), while her pure, hyper-real vision of suburban America places her among the most talented of the generation of writers dubbed "the children of Cheever."

"Given its level of sophistication and off-center wit, it's a bit startling to realize that O My Darling is Amity Gaige's first novel. The characters, beautifully drawn, are as unsentimental toward one another as their author is toward them and yet, wonderfully, this novel with its many ambushes of lyrical moments, is deeply felt."
-Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellanand The Coast of Chicago