The Great Matrimonial Debate

About the Book

Why would a man happily married and still in love with his wife become dangerously involved with another woman?  It is the question raised by this tale of Edward Seyton, a popular professor of music at a small college in Maine, who finds himself unexpectedly attracted to one of his students, Diane Rydelle, only a few years older than his daughter.  When he learns that the beautiful piano pupil in question is a newly-wed, the temptations which have been building to lead him off his straight and narrow path at first seem to have hit a dead end.  But Seyton invites the young couple over for dinner, and the evening is a great success.  It is the first stitch in a pattern: the Seytons and the young Rydelles become increasingly intimate, an almost exclusive quartet.  Dublin Rydelle is also a musician: not a student, but a highly successful folk troubadour.  The soirées involve spirited talk, music, dancing; sometimes the dancing sets the couples in a criss-cross shuffle.  The wine flows increasingly.  No one seems to know where all this is leading, but the erotic tang in the air is unmistakable.  

What supplies the special interest here is that Seyton is really no libertine; his focus in life is on music, his wife Jenny, and his daughter Maisie.  Maisie, though still a teenager, has already made her mark in the community as an unusually talented actress-in-the-making.  Although she senses that what is “going on” between her parents and their friends amounts to playing with fire, there is a bohemian streak in her that prevents her from judging them.  Her adored father can do no wrong.

When Maisie wins a coveted appointment to act at the Edinburgh Festival, the Seytons determine to use the good news as an excuse to spend the summer in Europe.  They invite the Rydelles to join them.  Maisie must go to Scotland when school is out.  The two couples will tour the continent, and join her for her theatrical performance.

Up to this point, we would seem to have been dwelling purely in a realm of comedy.  But as the foursome hits the roads of Britain and France we begin to see ominous signs that the bright party spirit prevailing among our spinning quartet cannot last.  The misguided marriage of the Rydelles is already coming apart, and now we see the steady old union of the Seytons also begin to reel and careen.

But if the quartet is a dangerous deck of cards, there is an unforeseen wild card in the person of the young actress, Maisie. The surprise unleashed by the Seytons´ innocent daughter brings the plot to a fever pitch, with tragic dynamics to be played out of divorce, death, a blood vendetta, and imprisonment.

Yet the story, despite dark overshadowings, does not close on a mercilessly tragic note. The real love story comes at the end. Edward and Jenny are two people who unquestionably love each other. While Jenny´s construction on what she has lived through is that her husband has been tried and humbled by events, the key question as we approach the novel´s close is whether she can gain Edward´s perspective: that it is marriage itself that is on trial. It is in the tension of this quandary that we become entangled, like Edward and Jenny, in the Great Matrimonal Debate.

About the Author

Within this book lie such poems as their writer finds worth salvaging. Who else will so deem them doesn’t so much matter. What matters is that they be set down in print, a testament in final, supreme gratitude for such quality of life rarely permitted anyone to get away with living. So saith T.J. King, who discovered and perfected the Best Revenge.