Book Review: Wedding Bell Blues
100 Years of Our Great Romance with Marriage
Tanya A. Brown

What would you expect from a book whose back cover description says "Wedding Bell Blues takes a lighthearted look at the curious customs, dizzy decorum, and prurient press surrounding modern marriage."?

What I wouldn't expect is a cut-and-paste book, approximately fifty percent of which centers around summary lists of movies, TV shows, and celebrity marriages. A book not so much written as assembled, glued together like a cheap plastic model kit.

Still, even cheap plastic kits have their place. It's hard not to be charmed by the book's reproductions of vintage pulp graphics, ads, and movie posters. "Runaway husbands: A national epidemic" screams a true confessions article. "Will he whisper praises about your skin?" asks a soap ad.

The excerpts from a century's worth of marriage manuals are also worth investigating. "When my husband closes the door of our apartment at night, he is no longer a man, he is a monster!", sobs a hapless advice-seeker. This section, although brief, does much to redeem the book.

One chapter features proverbs and philosophers' comments on marriage, most of which are pessimistic and appear to have been cut and pasted from Bartlett's. These are interesting, if a tad depressing.

If movie and TV marriages are going to comprise so much of the content, we want some meatier issues addressed. For example, my husband has frequently posed the question of whether Samantha of Bewitched could kick Jeannie of I Dream of Jeannie's butt in a catfight. Who is most powerful? And what in the heck does Samantha see in that putz, Darrin? Because frankly, Samantha's mother is right - she could do a lot better.

And so could have the authors of this book.

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