It’s pretty hard to write freshly about extramarital
affairs --- Tolstoy and Flaubert did it rather well, after all ---
and still more difficult to be honest and accurate about how a
marriage feels from the inside (if you’ve never been married,
you don’t know; if you are married, it feels disloyal).
Christina Schwarz attempts both in SO LONG AT THE FAIR, limiting
herself rigorously to a single crucial day in the life of a
not-so-romantic triangle. Jon and Ginny are a childless couple,
neither entirely happy nor desperately mismatched; Freddi is
Jon’s advertising agency colleague and mistress.

Schwarz does well with Jon’s sense of being
“unmoored” --- his guilty, shifting states of mind as
he vacillates between genuine devotion to Ginny and fierce
attraction to Freddi. But this is not a novel told from a
single-pointed perspective. We also hear what Ginny and Freddi are
thinking --- both women are nervous, angry and mostly keeping their
true feelings under wraps --- and Jon’s workmate Kaiser, who
knows about the affair but hasn’t (yet) spilled the beans.
And, just for good measure, we get a creepy look inside the brain
of Ethan, the obsessive-compulsive guy with a crush on Freddi.

Schwarz, it seems, wants to examine the affair in
Rashomon-like fashion, suggesting that there is no whole,
absolute truth to a marriage but only a range of fragmentary
visions. She keeps us in suspense about what Jon will do, whether
Ginny will find out, and how Freddi and Ethan’s story will
develop. All this is plausible. I loved her opening scene, a fight
between Jon and Ginny about nothing --- and everything. Schwarz
grasps the way one takes the temperature of a vulnerable marriage
as with a sick child, alternately feeling safe or uncertain or
furious or blessed. She gets its massive presence in an
individual’s life, a presence in which love or desire or
contentment becomes almost irrelevant.

Jon’s mother told him, when he first became engaged to
Ginny, that “marriage is a heavy thing,” and late in
the book he realizes she was right: “[H]e saw suddenly,
vividly, that that heaviness, that fabric of understandings and
misunderstandings, of events witnessed, celebrated, and mourned, of
dependable support and casual betrayal, of happy occasions of
agreement and of never-ending accommodations both willing and
grudging, that union, enduring despite insults and neglect,
relentlessly invested with hope, had become the bulk of his
life.”

If Schwarz had left it at that, I would have found SO LONG AT
THE FAIR an absorbing, intelligent book. However, she chose not
only to play with multiple viewpoints and numerous flashbacks, but
also to lard the novel with an italicized subplot, a skeletal,
murky tale of love and violence from 1963. Its relevance to the
main story doesn’t become clear until close to the end of the
novel, when we find out how the modern protagonists are related
through their parents’ older ties. I can’t say more
than that without giving away the plot; suffice it to say that it
involves rape, revenge and a near-fatal accident.

I understand that Schwarz might want to use this backstory to
suggest how the secrets and dramas of the past ripple out to touch
other lives and generations. But I became so confused by the double
narratives that at one point I had to make a diagram of the
characters and their connections to one another! Old-fashioned
historical novels give you family trees at the beginning and
helpful maps. Perhaps this tricky breed of modern fiction needs to
do the same.

In an interview, Schwarz acknowledges that she had intended the
1963 plot line to be an entirely separate novel; although it grew
out of SO LONG AT THE FAIR, “it was obviously too much of a
digression to stand as a chapter.” But when a friend
commented on the thematic relatedness of the two stories and urged
her to make them part of the same book, Schwarz says, “the
ol’ break-it-into-italicized-sections idea occurred to me and
to my surprise it worked.”

No, it didn’t. I got tired of guessing who was who, and
the subplot simply distracted me from the heart of the novel (and
its most immediate and compelling aspect): Jon, Ginny and
Freddi’s story. There seems to be a vogue these days for
writing books that jump between decades or juggle past and present.
Well handled, this is a wonderfully complex and evocative
technique; done mechanically, it just gums up the works.

SO LONG AT THE FAIR nonetheless has many attractive and
satisfying aspects, not the least of which is Schwarz’s skill
at recreating the small-town setting. The local country club is an
evocative reference point. Once a thriving concern and a locus of
assignation and danger, it is now derelict, its golf course a
tangled woodland that Ginny, a landscape architect, is hired to
work on as part of a high-end housing development. Class tensions,
always exaggerated in a community where a few families rule the
roost and everybody knows everybody else, rumble underneath the
drama. The title isn’t just metaphorical; there is an actual
fair (Summerfest, the big music festival held annually near
Milwaukee) at which all the protagonists wind up at the end of the
day --- and the novel --- in an eventful denouement.

Schwarz is talented. I’ll definitely read her next book,
and it was no great hardship to get through this one. I appreciate
her sense of place, her powers of observation, and her gift for
building ordinary yet fascinating characters. But in SO LONG AT THE
FAIR, I’m afraid that she loses sight of the whole and leaves
the reader floundering.