“The Marriage Bed” by Tommy Hays

There is young, falling-in-love love, and there is old, comfortable love. There is love that makes life easier, and there is love that breaks your heart. And finally, there is love you thought you knew, until you find out you actually may not have known it at all.

Tommy Hays, in his gentle novel The Marriage Bed (Blair 2026), explores all these kinds of love through the lens of a very typical American family who find themselves facing an unimaginable tragedy. Hays also explores the complex familial bonds between Asa and Betsy Flowers, the couple in the center of the story, and their two young adult children, Mitchell and Sara. The family dog Luna even plays a big role in this story, providing a litmus test of the emotional capacity of these people, just as pets do in real life.

The prose is deceptively simple, with an occasional piercing sentence carrying enormous emotional weight. Asa, after a devastating argument with his wife, puts water on to boil for supper, and “realize(s) this battered little pot was the sole survivor of a copperware set that had been a wedding present.” Another character describes heaven “not like some gaudy dream with harp-strumming angels hovering over streets of gold, but like a real place, a quiet little town just off the map, where families, when had become separated, knew to meet up.”

The setting, Asheville, North Carolina, is accurately depicted. In real life, Asheville is an interesting mixture of Appalachian culture, Southern history, and hipster trendiness, all nestled in a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains. In this book, all those elements are present—the new-age vet who communicates telepathically with dogs, the grassy old cemetery with neglected tombstones, and the groups of tourists and tour buses downtown. Hays touches on the natural beauty of the region as well—the heavy mid-autumn rainstorms, the wind moving the tree branches, and the moon disappearing behind the clouds.

The chapters take place in different times, told from the point of view of different characters, providing insight into why the characters act as they do. Unlike many novels that jump around chronologically, however, these various timelines remain distinct, causing the reader no confusion. Each chapter has a clear heading—“Asa, Fall 1992”  or “Sarah, Saturday Night”—that help ground the reader in the who and when. The novel ostensibly takes place over the course of seven days, but the flashback chapters let us experience the years, and even decades, leading up to this one pivotal week.

There is no grand epiphany here. This is a family that puts together puzzles, walks the dog, and makes hot tea, all while their world becomes “unraveled,” to use Sarah’s word. Asa, the true heart of the novel, examines his own shortcomings as a father and husband. He failed at times—many times, in fact—but he tried, and that is his saving grace. As he peels back the layers of his relationship with Betsy, we see how humans, with all their flaws, can accept the imperfections of life and love and still find it all enough.

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin’s Press 2005), In the Family Way (Random House, 1999), Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum 1992), and YA novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA 2013). He has published stories, profiles and book reviews in magazines, newspapers and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still:The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth. The winner of many literary awards, he is founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville’s community writing program as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program. He is based in Asheville, NC.