MARITAL ASSETS

Nominated for the Pulitzer

“Ducker surveys the subtle, treacherous landscape of love and betrayal in this poignant story of four middle-aged, well-to-do friends.  His unadorned yet elegant prose is well suited to his characters, the self-contained members of 'the leisure class at leisure'."
—Publishers Weekly

"Ducker's characters are well drawn and their story is skillfully told.  It's the grand passion of a repressed upper-class WASP whose acts do not equal his emotions." 
—Library Journal

"Elegantly under-plotted intrigue."
—Kirkus Review

“[Ducker’s] absorbing, beautifully crafted novels aren’t genre fiction, designed for a particular audience.  They showcase...a highly literate mind that reaches for artistry of expression.  When I first read MARITAL ASSETS...it was like listening to a concert from a box seat over the orchetra and watching the conductor.  I soaked in the sound, and witnessed the interplay between the performers.  The novel has all the necessary ingredients: people real enough to smell, drama and narrative tension.  It is wrapped in clear, elegant, intensely evocative language.  I had the sense that the conductor smiled through the performance.”
—Warwick Downing, author of Choice of Evils

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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 of full heart but a constricted emotional vocabulary.

Two couples of the American leisure class meet on holiday in the Caribbean. Charles Meredith and his wife occupy the same golf green as the Abbots. Claudia Abbott has inherited considerable wealth. Her marriage to Weemo is bound together by a curious trust provision. 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. While plot carries Ducker’s fourth novel, point of view remains a principal concern. The novel emerges from slightly refracted angles—diary entries and the view of the novelist. This double vision reveals Meredith as an unreliable but sympathetic narrator. The effect is powerful, and reinforces the critics’ praise of the qualities of this writer’s “sophistication, moral complexity, and worldwide sadness.”