RaveThe New YorkerTies is one half of a collaboration far more intriguing than co-authorship of individual books: a riveting dialogue on marriage conducted, on the page, between one novelist and another ... Ties is puzzle-like, architectural, a novel ingeniously constructed to conceal family secrets and then excavate them one by one ... Ties not only examines the male mentality that allows his abandonment to occur; it also lays bare the complicity between husband and wife in perpetuating the lie of their marriage.