Told in a casual, ruminative first-person voice, Beautiful Women; Ugly Scenes is an eyewitness report from an affluent old town near Princeton, the kind of suburb that real-estate agents call picturesque…. Life would be idyllic if only the couples living in these painstakingly renovated houses could get along. "But Alice and I had not even really liked each other for some time," confesses Bryan's narrator—"nor had we met any other couples who did!"

The hero of this utterly absorbing novel, a documentary-film maker dedicated to "the courtship and seduction of beautiful women," is in the midst of what he shamelessly calls a "mid-life crisis." His second marriage is foundering; he's beset by insomnia, depression, nameless anxieties…. Bryan's couples make Updike's seem like the ones on The Newlywed Game….

Bryan's narrator is a diligent pupil in the school of life, eager to learn and change, to become more sensitive to women's "needs." He broods incessantly over why relationships go wrong, admits that he wants a wife like his mother, confers with other unhappily married men about "why our wives are so angry with us so much of the time." He tries to understand women …, but he's still more interested in hustling them off to bed than in appreciating them—until he falls in love with Odette, a French housewife who lives down the street. (p. 96)

[The] very bluntness of Bryan's style, his willingness to put … clichés in his characters' mouths, gives the novel a kind of sociological interest. It's as if he can't be bothered with literature; things are so bad that he has to blurt out his story however he can. His voice is colloquial and direct, as if he were speaking into a tape recorder…. Yet this way of confiding in the reader, thinking out loud, returning obsessively to crucial scenes like a patient on the couch, is a calculated literary tactic; I have rarely read a novel that so thoroughly suppressed all traces of its fictional design. Whether or not it's autobiographical (and the dedication to "Monique" seems like a giveaway), the digressive meditations and groping efforts to describe what happened seem as spontaneous as a telephone conversation. Even Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, those masters of the first-person voice, never conceal the literary nature of their enterprise; their styles are so fluent that they call attention to themselves. Bryan drones on with a stammering candor that insists, This happened to someone, and in just this way. The art is in the artlessness.

Bryan's film maker is so flat-footed, so humorless, so preoccupied with his problems, that he's like a friend in trouble; you start out feeling that you have to listen to him, only to end up fascinated by his woeful story. His psychobabble about "anger" and "needs" and "relationships" is offered up without a trace of irony…. The language is so obvious that it disarms criticism.

The novel's pace is daringly slow. Couples bicker, children whine, real-estate agents phone up, repairmen drop by to discuss the furnace. Houses are described with an attention to detail worthy of Better Homes and Gardens…. Bryan's protagonist derives such pleasure from these matters, is such a maven on mortgage rates and rotting shingles, chair-rail moldings and dovetail joints, that I found myself wanting to know more…. Enthusiasm is an attractive quality.

It's curious that Bryan's narrator has no name. Even in the passages written as a screenplay, his lines are spoken by "Myself"—a ploy that makes the speaker more detached and objective than most fictional characters, less burdened by traits that force the reader to approve or disapprove of him. For all his candor, Bryan's film maker really says very little about himself, his parents, his childhood; he's like a character in a movie, introduced at some critical moment in his life and followed through a discrete sequence of events. His anonymity makes him typical, unobtrusive. Not all men are like this one—sexually acquisitive, threatened by women, needy, and incapable of intimacy—but enough are to give Bryan's portrait of his conscientious if unprogressive hero a documentary value.

Bryan has exercised the novelist's prerogative of revenge to the full, giving the film maker the best lines, depicting his wife as a frigid shrew, and skating lightly over his sexual misdemeanors. This character just can't seem to get it into his head that leaving his family to go off and teach in Colorado for a whole semester, or having an affair with his wife's cousin, might have unpleasant consequences. But his testimony about the rewards and perils of sex is remarkably clear-eyed, explicit but never titillating. He makes it known that he's attractive to women without boasting about it, and his appreciation of women's bodies is more aesthetic than voyeuristic…. (pp. 96-7)

This chivalrous self-image is a little unbelievable. Can Bryan's protagonist have finally succeeded in eradicating all traces of Herzog's vindictive rage or Rojack's blunt hunger for conquest? But his solicitude toward Odette, his tolerance when she goes off to France for a few months or sleeps with someone else in revenge for an imagined lapse on his part, is made plausible by his desperation. "I do not want to lose this woman," he declares at the outset; and by the last page … it's clear that he has learned something from his marital ordeals—that the old talents of seduction and betrayal are both self-destructive and insignificant in comparison with the rewards of fidelity. (p. 98)