“Mother. Daughter. They Both Wanted Him!” That sums up Myron Brinig’s 1950 novel No Marriage in Paradise about as neatly as possible. The mother, whose unlikely name is Alix, and the daughter, whose even more unlikely name is Duff, end up rivals for the mother’s latest younger boyfriend, an artist named Pete. When the daughter steals Pete and runs away to marry him that throws Alix, who had never had trouble attracting men, into an existential crisis. Best way to solve that? Another man. Despite the seeming sleaze elements here, Brinig was a serious writer, often discussed as part of a cohort of pre-World War II Jewish writers born in the U.S. who mined their parents’ or grandparents’ immigrant experiences for fiction. Brinig, who worked between 1929 and 1958, was also among the first to explore gay characters in American novels. The cover art for No Marriage in Paradise is uncredited but very probably by Ed Paulsen, and almost—but not quite—fits into our themed collection of artists and models. You can see that amusing group here.
