BOOK REVIEW / Is there life after marriage?: 'Perfect Husbands (& Other Fairy Tales)' - Regina Barreca: Harmony, 20 pounds

LOVE and marriage, we used to be told, go together like a horse and carriage. If so, we in Britain have now reached a point where the axle breaks or the horses bolt in about 40 per cent of cases, strewing dazed and injured casualties along the way. The rate of breakdown is even higher in the United States, suggesting that something might be wrong with the institution itself. Any honest critique of marriage would have at least to address this possibility, but Regina Barreca rules it out in her first chapter.

In response to the question 'Why a husband?', the twice-married Barreca makes a cute comparison between single life and her aunts' habit of keeping the best furniture covered up: 'I never felt comfortable with the way my aunts kept those plastic slipcovers, those invisible barriers, over the furniture as if they were afraid of the mess and destruction and markings of life,' she writes, 'as if they thought that one day there might be some better reason to unwrap the good stuff than simply the pleasure of settling down into it'.

Staying single seems to represent for Barreca a form of postponement, a failure to engage with life. The problems with this argument are obvious, not least because it appears to posit an either/or dichotomy in which not being married is synonymous with 'uninvolved' or even 'celibate'. It should be fairly obvious by now that a marriage certificate is no longer an index of the degree of intimacy in someone's life, and doesn't say much about the frequency of their sexual activity. For many who live together, marriage is irrelevant or an option for the future, while even people who live alone have been known to have a sex life.

Barreca is, above all, a sentimentalist. Having started with a presumption in favour of marriage, she limits herself to asking questions like 'What kind of partnerships do we expect? What kinds of romances do we want?' Although she is a professor, this is a supremely unacademic book, structured like an American TV programme for people with very short attention spans. Each page has its cross-heading, most of them couched in the sassy, wise-cracking style of female comedians like Joan Rivers: 'Why is God a bachelor?', etc.

Barreca does not demystify marriage so much as reduce it to a series of one-liners. Some of these are mildly amusing - 'Women seem to have fantasies about somebody going down the aisle, where men just have fantasies about somebody going down' - but they actually serve to perpetuate stereotypes of sexually voracious men and romantically scheming women. Since she is not going to discuss marriage per se, Barreca has to write about something and she fills up a good deal of the book with hackneyed feminist observations about her own teenage expectations of love and romance.

Many of her potential readers will have lived through the Fifties and Sixties themselves and have long since moved on. It's doubtful whether they need another critique of Carole King singing 'Will you still love me tomorrow?' or an analysis of male and female roles in Wuthering Heights along the lines of 'Cathy gives up Heathcliff for Linton as you might replace bungee-jumping with jump rope'.

There is no sense, in Barreca's book, of cultural texts carrying different degrees of authority. Wuthering Heights and Portrait of a Lady are discussed in the same breath, and with the same seriousness, as titles like American Couples: Money, Work, Sex and Smart Women, Foolish Choices. All are used promiscuously to bolster Barreca's thesis that while modern marriage poses a few problems, 'there are good, reasonable chances to create a future that includes room for life as well as for love. Married life does not, after all, have to be a contradiction in terms'.

This may be what Barreca's affluent, middle-class, childless audience wants to hear; the absence of any discussion of alternatives to marriage is matched by her failure to mention its function as an environment for bringing up children. The book ends with a nauseating description of Barreca's folksy second wedding which seems calculated to demonstrate the triumph of hope over experience. If this feeble book is the best a reasonably intelligent apologist for marriage can come up with, then the institution is really doomed. Husbands, who needs them?