As Good As It Gets

Determined to preserve their dreams and their marriage, Ted and Hallie Bennett weather the storms of society as it sweeps from the fifties, through the turbulent sixties and seventies, to the eighties. 20,000 first printing.

Wed in the innocent early '60s, Hallie and Ted Bennett experience the vicissitudes of married life in a trite novel whose central question is whether their love will endure as they both mature. Beginning with an insipid scene of wedding-night jitters, Greber ( Mendocino ) early on sledgehammers her message that marriage takes work. She traces the Bennetts' lives over three decades, from Boston to Silicon Valley and across the changing face of American culture. The social and sexual storms of the '60s and '70s and the materialism of the go-go '80s test the couple's commitment, which seems prehistoric to their friends. Hallie's social conscience allows the introduction of such topics as the Vietnam War, feminism and AIDS but ruminating on wedded bliss--or its lack--remains her principal occupation: "The whole business was infinitely more complex than she'd suspected." When Hallie gets her law degree, her specialty is, of course, divorce. Flaws and compromise may be as good as marriage gets, but readers expect more from a book.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A third commercial fiction foray by the author of Mendocino (1988) that reads like every baby-boomer's back pages, beginning in 1960, long before the ``lovable, funny bright girl'' Ted Bennett marries becomes a ``goddamned harpy.'' The girl is Hallie, who really wants to go to law school, but then her diaphragm springs a leak and she has the first of three children with drop-dead handsome Ted, an ambitious engineer who doesn't mean to hold Hallie back but can't quite help it. He wants to do well, and that takes precedence. Just as the last Bennett baby toddles off to kindergarten and mom gets accepted at Harvard Law, Ted takes a job in California, meaning Hallie must put her hopes on the back burner again. Eventually, though, she does get her J.D., specializing in helping downtrodden divorc‚es whose plights amaze her, since her own marriage continues to chug along. Sure, she doesn't like Ted's new job as president of a fast-track Silicon Valley firm (it seems like a sell-out), and they're not as intimate as they once were--but, hey, Hallie knows marriage is no bed of roses. It's just that Ted finally succumbs to temptation and has an affair, leaving the marriage to blow up right before Greber runs out of recent pop history to recycle. Still, the curtain falls on a happy domestic scene--as it must in such a recidivistic fairy tale. Hallie isn't really a character, just Everywoman's voice; and Ted is every married woman's dream husband (lovable warts and all). -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The author of Mendocino ( LJ 3/1/88) follows Ted and Hallie Bennett through 40 years of marriage, during which both partners make compromises as they raise children, deal with their separate careers, and relocate across the country. When a major midlife crisis prompts Ted to have a brief affair, the couple consider divorce. They ultimately affirm their strong commitment to the marriage, but this positive, hopeful conclusion is achieved only after much serious soul-searching. The characters come alive in this fast-paced modern novel, which can be compared in some ways to Marilyn French's The Women's Room ( LJ 11/15/77); the scope, realistic subject matter, and themes are similar, but Greber writes without French's harsh feminist tone. The fortysomething crowd will see both positive and negative aspects of their lives portrayed in this emotional novel. For popular fiction collections with a large female clientele.
- April L. Judge, Thousand Oaks Lib., Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.