Other Men's Daughters

"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 of Other 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.