Eight years ago, readers were invited to accompany Maurice Locksley on his rounds, as he paid court to his wife, his ex-wife, and his mistress in dizzying succession. The Marriage Hearse, his account of that wild winter’s night, was judged “one of the funniest, smartest, and most generous novels about marriage from a male point of view.” (Phyllis Rose, The Nation) Now, eight years older in The Alibi Breakfast, Locksley is still “laugh-out-loud funny” (Bloomsbury Review) but not nearly so cocky as he contemplates the possibility that his riches are reduced to a single woman—or is it even worse than that? Duberstein’s prose is as rich, precise, and allusive as ever; the people in his “house” are as real as the people in your house (terrifying thought), and he weaves the varied strands of plot into a tale of rare depth and integrity.
