Other Men's Daughters [Paperback]

“Until the day of Merriwether’s departure from the house—a month after his divorce—the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one” we read on the first page ofOther Men’s Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern’s novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, “the origin of so much story and disorder,” can be.“As if Chekhov had writtenLolita. . . . I would contend that in its own felicitous small-scale way,Other Men’s Daughtersis to . . . the sixties whatThe Great Gatsbywas to the twenties,The Grapes of Wrathto the thirties, andRabbit Is Richto the seventies: a microscope exactly focused on a definitive specimen of what was once the present American moment.” —Philip Roth, from the Introduction

“A novel so good it would have been one of the most valid contenders for the Great American Novel of the decade. It may have achieved in a sane, civilized, academic and romantic way what its showier contemporaries miss by a mile.”
—Ann Rosenberg,The Philadelphia Inquirer

“It is a pleasure to find a novel written with such intelligence and feeling, a novel that judges none of its people but holds them up to calm and affectionate scrutiny.Other Men’s Daughters. . . is ‘relevant’—but its real subject is in the disruptions and exaltlƒ½