The Cuck

Mark Peppers has a simple problem: his wife is getting her freak on with other people.

Simple, with complications: they have an open marriage, so he’s supposed to be OK with it, and the arrangement was their couples therapist’s idea, so he doesn’t have any help on that front. All he wants is to love her, and to raise their two children in a happy home. (While also keeping any deviations from the norm well-hidden from his Irish Catholic parents.) And of course he wants to do well (or well enough) at his job, as an analyst helping to provide (or perhaps deny) healthcare for the sick kids of the greater Boston area. And sure, he wants to tag along with his wife on swingers night, just to keep an eye on things. And maybe when he’s at the sports bar feeling sorry for himself, and he sees an old flame from high school…wait, is having an open marriage really a problem?

Frank Santo’s The Cuck is a devastating (and devastatingly funny) literary look at the travails of modern marriage, the permissions we give and get, and how those can reverberate through our lives in ways both tragic and comic. It’s a sharp novel about love and forgiveness, parenting and kink-shaming, about escaping the rigid legacy of an Irish Catholic family, and maybe getting a little lost in the woods when you’re running away from all that. Still, there’s all that shame and humiliation when you end up there and…wait, are you into that? Am I into that? Who knows? Let’s go.