Other Men's Daughters (New York Review Books Classics)

Until the day of Merriwether s departure from the house a month after his divorce the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one we read on the first page of Other Men s Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern s novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, the origin of so much story and disorder, can be.