BOOKS IN BRIEF Married A Fine Predicament by Anne Roiphe Basic, 285 pp., $25 Feminists appear to be having second thoughts about the institution they deconstructed, now that the woods are teeming with unhappy singles. “There is abroad in the land an acute anxiety about marriage,” announces Anne Roiphe, novelist, essayist, and self-confessed feminist. Gloria Steinem may believe “a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle,” but Roiphe thirsted for “feminist family values”: “I wanted a family the way a person lost in the desert wants a drink of water.” To her credit, Roiphe didn’t make empty threats. She pursued wedded bliss in a discouraging social climate. Her father was a serial philanderer who drove her mother to drink. Her first husband left her “the way one leaves the scene of an accident, quickly.” And even though she insists that “ever after is not a possibility,” her second marriage appears to have taken her to cloud nine, with five daughters (one of them Katie, the maverick feminist celebrated for her book debunking date rape) and a happy husband. Her personal history has left Anne Roiphe with subversive thoughts. (“It wouldn’t be a bad idea if it became uncool to live together before marriage.”) But she has has no strategy for getting the toothpaste back in the tube. What she does is rattle on and on about the “predicament.” Allusions to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Medea, and Desdemona prove the author probably had a liberal arts education. She compares Clinton’s congressional impeachment committee to the censorious community of Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter”–gee whiz! “Married” is sprinkled with gossip, grudges, small talk, and gratuitous references from the liberal boilerplate: “reactionary talk show hosts,” “the religious right,” “judgmental,” “Jim Lehrer.” But these are non sequiturs in a text that is hopelessly romantic. It concludes with a sentimental rhapsody over passing on the family china as a wedding gift. I loved it. But, one has to say, it comes a bit late in our cultural meltdown. –Martin Levin City of Bones by Michael Connelly Warner, 394 pp., $25.95 Over the past decade Michael Connelly has established himself as our premiere writer of “hard-boiled” detective stories. Though he lacks the literary flair of a Hammett or Chandler, he combines the virtues of their genre with those of the police procedural. His latest, “City of Bones,” is the eighth in a series featuring Los Angeles homicide detective Harry Bosch. The chance recovery of a human bone leads Bosch to discover the skeletal remains of a child murdered 20 years previously. Learning that the child had been the victim of “44 separate indications of trauma” over his short life, Bosch vows to get the killer. That quixotic vow to solve a 20-year-old murder will come as no surprise to Connelly’s readers. The most striking word used to describe Bosch throughout the series is “righteous”–a word that has fallen largely into ill-repute. Yet it is appropriate, for Bosch is animated not by a sense of moral superiority but by a need to rectify injustice. The most revealing passage in the book occurs when Bosch explains, “I have faith and I have a religion. Call it blue religion. . . . It’s the belief that this won’t just go by. That those bones came out of the ground for a reason. That they came out of the ground for me to find, and for me to do something about. And that’s what holds me together and keeps me going.” “City of Bones” is well written and gripping, but in some ways unsatisfying. The brilliance of Connelly’s series is in part due to the fact that the reader simultaneously is led to pull for Bosch and to dislike the total dedication that makes him characteristically rude and quick to anger. The Bosch of “City of Bones” is no model of urbanity (let alone the tough-guy-as-sensitive-male, as Robert Parker’s Spenser has become), but he has lost his edge. In this novel we see a Bosch who jokes, apologizes, expresses his feelings, and so on. The connection between Bosch’s vices and his righteous virtue makes us hope Bosch rediscovers the incivility that allows him to be such a compelling champion of the just. –Steve Lenzner
