[Broyard was an American author and critic. In the following review, he suggests that the title story of Adultery, and Other Choices is most reflective of Dubus's talent for storytelling.]

Freshening up the subject of adultery in fiction is no mean feat and Andre Dubus does a good job of it in the long title story of Adultery and Other Choices. Edith and Hank Allison have what Hank describes as "a loving, intimate marriage," and to a degree, this is true. Hank is both tender and passionate with Edith, he respects her, and he wants and needs the stable structure of their life together.

Yet Edith feels that Hank, who is a novelist and teacher, "is keeping himself in reverse," that "with his work he created his own harmony, and then he used the people he loved to relax with." While such a relationship lacks the romantic extravagance that so many of us hope for in the unreasonable depths of our hearts, it succeeds for perhaps the same reason. Its demands can comfortably be met. Relaxing with someone can be dressed up as love, especially when a man brings to his wife the intense afterglow of his work.

But the arrangement cannot afford any further qualifications. When Hank admits that he is having an affair, that is bad enough: when he adds that he does not believe in the "unnatural boundaries of life-long monogamy," there is for Edith no longer any raison d'être in their marriage. She has given herself to Hank, and he has given her back. She does not know what to do with the stranger she has suddenly become. Is she liberated or abandoned? She can't tell.

When Edith tries to defend and rediscover herself by having an affair with Jack Linhart, she exchanges her emotional security for the peculiar chess game, for the acrostics of adultery. But adultery turns out to be only a kind of pressure cooker compared to the leisurely feast of marriage. Edith feels that she and Jack "made love too much, pushing their bodies to consume the yearning they had borne and to delay the yearning that was waiting." She finds it difficult to live, or love, in spasms.

How does one enjoy adultery? Edith wonders, looking at Debbie, one of Hank's students and his latest mistress. In her affair with Hank, Debbie "had come without history into not history"—how can that be enough? Who can live on it?

Edith articulates her own needs when she falls in love with Joe, a former Catholic priest. Before her, Joe was a virgin, and she feels that "she holds his entire history in her body." While this is too much to expect of love, it does throw some perspective on what love ideally strives for. When Joe dies of cancer, Edith understands that one of the things love does is to console us for the fact of death. Love is a flirtation with immortality: nothing less will do. Her marriage with Hank is not profound enough to fortify her against death, and perhaps that function is its only ultimate justification.

Not all of the stories in Adultery and Other Choices are as satisfying as this one. Several stories about childhood seem to be, like virtually all stories about childhood, lugubrious. The looking back in this kind of fiction is usually the least dimensional form of nostalgia. It is difficult enough to make an adult interesting, and a child's vulnerability may have been turned into a tired cliché by post-Freudian fiction. In the end, it seems that such stories are most moving to the author himself and that what the reader feels may be only a detached pity that does not even pass through art.

Army stories are not much better, and Mr. Dubus has written some of these too. Like adultery, Army life offers a temporary intensity with severely limited references. More successful is a story called "The Fat Girl," in which an unattractively stout girl diets herself into beauty, marriage, and what is generally regarded as a reasonably happy life, only to discover that she has also dieted away her appetite for that life, that, in some way, her fatness was part of her essence and now she is only a mannequin of other people's expectations.

In the title story of Adultery and Other Choices, Mr. Dubus appears to have found his best voice. Even without the help of some good moments in the lesser stories, this one alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book.