Marital Assets - Hardcover

Ducker, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1877946265 ISBN 13: 9781877946264

Publisher: Permanent Pr Pub Co, 1993

Marital Assets demonstrates that there remain subtle ways to have a love affair. Its theme is passion, a theme dramatized through an unlikely protagonist: a man full of heat but a constricted emotional vocabulary.

Two couples of the American leisure class meet on holiday. The Merediths have visited this particular Caribbean club for years. A schedule change places Charles Meredith, a New York estate lawyer, and his wife on the same golf green as the Abbotts. Through her family, Claudia Abbott has inherited considerable wealth. Claudia considers challenging the terms of the trust, and Charles Meredith counsels her on her predicament, first on the beach and later in Aspen, where the couples have planned a reunion.

In Aspen, they expand their group to five, and the circles of love and resentment pile up like quoits. As Charles, a man of lyric but thwarted sensibilities, helps Claudia to resolve her dilemma, his confronts his own.

While the plot carries Ducker’s fourth novel, point of view remains a principal concern. The narrative emerges from slightly refracted angles—diary entries and the viewpoint of the novelist. This double vision reveals Charles Meredith as an unreliable but sympathetic diarist. The effect is powerful, and reinforces the critics’ praise of Ducker’s earlier fiction: “In its sophistication, moral complexity, and worldwide sadness, readers may be reminded of Marquand and Auchincloss.”

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From Kirkus Reviews:

From the vantage of his diary 15 years after he and his wife Evelyn first came to know Weemo and Claudia Abbott, Charles Meredith, an attorney thoughtfully nearing retirement, traces the course of the passionate friendship between the two couples. Though he instantly likes affable, unpretentious Weemo, a child of the middle class gracefully grown into marriage to the Parine Pen family, it's Claudia who captures Charles's timid heart when they meet at a private club in the Caribbean. Without meaning to slight his patient, deliberate wife, Charles leaps to self-assured Claudia's aid when she asks him to explain the terms under which her shares of Parine are held in trust. Will she indeed lose her inheritance if she divorces Weemo within the next seven years? In a legal twist reminiscent of Ducker's Bankroll (1989), Charles soon discovers that as an adopted child, rather than as an ``heir of the body,'' of her doting father, Claudia may have no claim on the Parine shares at all. As he presses her bullheaded brother Gordon's lawyer for meetings, the scene shifts to Aspen, where the couples share absent Gordon's sumptuous mountain lodge and take charming L.A. businessman Jeremy Slatkin into their circle--as Weemo and Evelyn take each other to bed. Charles, lacking their forthrightness, can neither consummate his affair with Claudia nor press hard enough for the legal remedy he wants to present her--though he senses that Jeremy, equally in love with her, has some kind of legal fireworks up his sleeve. Some quiet last-minute surprises do little to disturb the ruefully self- comforting tenor of Charles's reflections. Ducker's elegantly underplotted intrigue will leave the grosser appetites unsated. Even more patrician tastes, however, may find Charles's gentlemanly inertia and his lucubrations upon it less interesting than they are plainly intended to be. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ducker ( Bankroll ) surveys the subtle, treacherous landscape of love and betrayal in this poignant story of four middle-aged, well-to-do friends. Journal entries by 61-year-old New York City lawyer Charles Meredith tell of events that began 15 years earlier, when he and his wife Evelyn, vacationing in the Caribbean, met William (Weemo) and Claudia Abbott. Third-person narratives supply additional viewpoints, which let readers know before Charles does that a friendly foursome has turned into an adulterous love triangle. Claudia, who was adopted, seeks Charles's help when her wealthy grandfather leaves his fortune only to "heirs of the body." Claudia and Charles, who early on declares that he has lived his life "without passion," have an unconsummated romance, while Weemo and Evelyn enjoy a brief affair. California lawyer Jeremy Slatkin, aiding Charles in Claudia's case, joins their summer vacation in Aspen and leads the way to the suit's settlement. Claudia leaves Weemo, but not for Charles, whose reminiscences are full of both regret and acceptance. Ducker's unadorned yet elegant prose is well suited to his characters, the self-contained members of the "leisure class at leisure."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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