LIVES OF THE WIVES Five Literary Marriages

Erin Bennett's voice is lovely, and she delivers this gossipy study of addiction and pathology with thoughtful sympathy. The material, harvested from in-depth biographies and memoirs by others, is predictably shocking, given the marriages the author chose, and is often fascinating, especially if you are more interested in spectacle than illumination. Radclyffe Hall, Kingsley Amis, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, Kenneth Tynan, and Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal provide the specimens, and all are unhappy in their own ways. In some cases, the wives are artists in their own rights though it's pathologies more than art that link these couples. The writing is sometimes clunky, but Bennett is excellent at subtly indicating changes of voice. Occasional mispronunciations of proper names distract, but only a little. B.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2023]