Shelli and Stefan Matson, the lead characters in Joanna Kadish’s CHARTING A MARRIAGE, are an attractive, intelligent, and educated Jewish couple living in suburban New Jersey. After starting a family and sharing over a decade their lives, Stefan urges Shelli to consider swinging with other couples to help their marriage thrive and endure. Despite Shelli’s reluctance, she agrees to her husband’s wishes and finds herself involved in a satisfying relationship with a worldly, sexually generous Dutchman who seems to embody everything her husband wants to be. CHARTING A MARRIAGE explores whether and how Shelli and Stefan’s relationship can survive the exploratory path they follow.

Kadish balances cool observation with a sympathetic portrayal of a self-involved couple during the sea-foam success of American 1990s dot.com affluence. Shelli and Stefan could be the Yiddish-spouting, Jersey shore cousins of Sherman and Judy McCoy from Tom Wolfe’s satirical Bonfire of the Vanities. Setting her novel in the 1990s serves as a perfect backdrop: entitled, self-involved characters work, lust, parent, and socialize in an America at the height of its narcissistic, dizzying financial apex. Unlike Wolfe, the irony in Kadish’s story rarely takes center stage. Instead, Kadish provides a small story that explores with depth and sensitivity the internal landscapes of desire, insecurity, the deep ambivalence present in many long-term relationships, and the complex implications of open marriage.

Kadish tells the story from both Shelli and Stefan’s perspectives. Shelli’s perspective dominates; the depiction of her dimensional, interior emotional life may be the book’s greatest strength. She is by turns insecure, passionate, angry, understanding, tender and prone to endearing and occasionally disconnected classical analogies. While Stefan’s perspective is infrequent, and Shelli’s observations of his casual cruelties inhibit sympathy for his character, his experience in this story presents a greater pathos. Stefan’s relationship-affirming intent is to use swinging to bring Shelli along while he explores the sexual expression that has often eluded him. In stark contrast to the worldly, relaxed Wilhelm, Stefan’s desires are scuttled by his insecurity and misogyny, leaving him at a loss as to why women do not necessarily call him back. A successful man riding the crest of a successful time, he cannot seem get beyond himself to reach his sexual holy grail.

Joanna Kadish’s CHARTING A MARRIAGE is an interesting timepiece of a novel that sensitively considers the nuances of swinging, desire, and the natural complexity of married life.

~Ellen Graham for IndieReader