Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel, The Story of a Marriage, is the much-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Confessions of Max Tivoli.

The setting is San Francisco, 1953, and the narrator is Pearlie Cook, whose lyrical opening words, a kind of soliloquy for her damaged marriage, set the tone for this lovely, sensitive, thought-provoking novel. “Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it.”

As with Confessions, Greer has intricately drawn San Francisco in another time. Pearlie and her husband, Holland Cook, grew up together in Kentucky in the years leading up to World War II. Now, they are adults, parents to a young boy, living far from the homes of their childhood, making a life in San Francisco’s unfashionable Sunset District, once known as the Outside Lands. One day while Holland is at work, a stranger comes knocking on their door, identifying himself as Buzz Drummer, an old friend of Holland’s from the war years. Despite Pearlie’s initial wariness about him, they eventually become close friends, and Buzz becomes a part of their family.

One day, Buzz makes a startling revelation about the past, a revelation which forces Pearlie to make a life-altering choice. This happens at the end of Part One, around the same time we learn another fact about Pearlie Cook that complicates the plot even further. It’s difficult to write about The Story of a Marriage without giving anything away, given the delicate pace at which the plot proceeds. So I will say nothing more here by way of summary, other than that the rest of the book centers on this impossible choice, a choice that deeply complicates Pearlie’s relationship with both her husband and with Buzz. In the background, always, is Pearlie’s young son, his presence a reminder, both to Pearlie and the reader, of how much is at stake.

One of the most touching things about this novel is the sense one gets of the author’s total honesty, the feeling that the discoveries Greer has made in the process of writing the book have been shared, generously and unabashedly, with the reader. “This is a war story,” Pearlie says more than three-quarters of the way through the novel. “It was not meant to be. It started as a love story, the story of a marriage, but the war has stuck to it everywhere like shattered glass.” So while it is called The Story of a Marriage, it is also the story of a time in America’s history. The silences that divide one couple, the Cooks, serve here as a microcosm of a greater silence, an atmosphere of secrecy and divisiveness that falls over the whole of society.

There are surprises throughout, and, ultimately, there is hope. One night Pearlie stands outside a bar and observes, “Beyond the inscrutable movements of these men, the world they had built beneath the ordinary one; beyond the seedy lights and grimy hotels…it was a feeling, which I could not name at the time, of something awakening…It was as if part of the body was stirring, moving very slowly to rouse the rest.”

Admirers of Confessions may recall that one of Greer’s greatest gifts is his kindness to his characters; that same gift is on full display here. His characters fail and fumble, and ultimately, they find their way.

A wonderful book. And you won’t have to wait long to read it; The Story of a Marriage will be out next week. For readings and signings, visit Andrew Sean Greer’s website.