Another novel, another marriage, another marital breakdown - but this is slightly different. Lurking behind what has become a convention, almost a requirement, is something rather more universal, and also more dignified: an immense nostalgia for the settled state, not merely for happiness but for trust, for the knowledge that one will not be betrayed. That this once existed, and was wilfully brought to an end, imparts an aura of tragedy to an exasperatingly familiar scenario. The marriage in question is treated as something so ideal that the only possible progress is downward, towards, if not ruin, then certainly expulsion. Thus the world's oldest story is re-enacted, by characters apparently as obtuse as Adam and Eve, but without the benefit of ignorance. The fall, if that is what it is, is seen as ineluctable, and this is peculiarly interesting. The extreme happiness and satisfaction of this particular husband and wife leads them into assumptions of complacency, even grandiosity: if this is allowed - this perfect marriage - then surely infidelity is almost an obligation, an entitlement. For every obscure dissatisfaction there must be a remedy. Through thickets of abrupt and idiosyncratic writing James Salter anatomises a common moral dilemma, which may no longer be a dilemma: guilt-free suffering, with the benefit of added compensations.

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