"A Chronicle of Infidelity" contains a subject of a sensitive and controversial nature.  A woman cheats on her husband and he "forgives" her, but can’t get over the thought of another man having touched his wife.  In order to "move on" and have a sense of closure, he decides to cheat on her in return.  He hopes two wrongs will set things right in his life.

Such a premise should create a story rife with tension, angst and soul-searching.  The exploration of commitment, the emotion of adultery, wrestling with sin—it sounds like great drama.  I found it the complete opposite.  The narrative is dull and slow-paced, filled with unnecessary and stale details that don’t contribute to the tone or the plot.  Dialogue between characters is equally lacking in spark.  I don’t know if it’s because the story is written in present-tense, but it comes across like bullet notes in an essay, lifeless.  Here’s an example:

"I’m downstairs in the kitchen. Eggs. Ham. Toast. No time for pancakes. I hear the shower go on upstairs. A bar of soap hits the shower floor. A few more moments. She shower is off. Breakfast smells good. I’m hungry. I serve us both. She runs down. We eat, hardly say a word."

Grammatical errors aside (She shower is off? really?)  the details are unlikely and unnecessary.  He must have good hearing to know a bar of soap hit the shower floor over the sound of running water a floor away.  But who cares?

Stylistically, if I gave the author the benefit of the doubt, the early chapters could be showing the dull complacency of the protagonist’s life and this leads to his exploring other options, in which case the text should improve.  But the last few chapters of the book are just as dull and plodding. 

Worse, the narrator hasn’t learned anything particularly fulfilling.  He hasn’t grown as a person, gotten over his wife’s cheating, or found closure.  By the end of the novel he’s just become selfish and further distanced himself from people.  When a woman he’s sleeping with tells him she wants to be "friends with benefits" (paraphrased, what she said I wouldn’t repeat) and not be in a relationship, he thinks to himself "The best way to get over rejection is to sleep with other girls."  (again, paraphrased, as I prefer not to be vulgar in reviews.)  Not an insight I find particularly enlightened.

Fundamentally, the character comes across as amoral, in the worst possible way.  Not in a tragically flawed anti-hero, like Satan in Paradise Lost, but in a dull, plodding, sin-is-despair kind of way.  A character trapped within his own lack of life, and it leads to a lackluster story.

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