This Side of Married

Intelligent, crisp, ironic, and well-paced, This Side of Married brings to mind a pleasing cross of Jane Austen and Laurie Colwin. It is a sparkling domestic novel of romantic love and familial loyalties that is as heady as a glass of good champagne and as deliciously pleasurable as an authentic Sacher torte.   This Side of Married introduces the Rubin girls—three eligible sisters in an affluent family in a comfortable Philadelphia suburb, dominated by a strong-willed matriarch whose defining wish is to see each of them well-married. One daughter, Isabel, already is, although less than happily; a second, Alice, is about to tumble head over heels into a speedy engagement; the third and youngest, Tina, is blithely and resolutely single, though always dreaming of the perfect wedding to come. As various men enter from the wings, the daughters’ lives are thrown into unexpected upheaval—from Theo, Isabel’s lawyer husband, who is hardly the idealistic young man he once was; to Anthony Wolf, the promising cardiologist to whom Dr. Rubin, the girls’ mother, introduces Alice; to his friend, Simon Goldenstern, Anthony’s sardonic journalist friend who does everything in his power to protect the girls from the big bad wolf; to the unlikely cousin who turns up, Soren Zank, an environmentalist who made his first fortune in Silicon Valley, and who becomes the comic relief in this smartly observed and richly satisfying contemporary comedy of manners.