http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110008693
FIVE BEST
High Infidelity
My favorite novels about cheating lovers.

BY LOUIS BEGLEY
Saturday, July 22, 2006 12:00 a.m.

1. "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert (1857).

Set in rural Normandy in the 1830s and 1840s, "Madame Bovary" tells the story of a peasant's daughter, Emma, who has had her head filled with romantic notions at the convent school to which she was sent at the age of 13. She marries Charles Bovary, the local doctor, and quickly discovers that this well-meaning man is incompetent, timid and a dullard. His personal habits revolt her; the life she leads is squalid. She seeks escape in two tawdry love affairs, but her passion wearies and frightens her lovers, who abandon her. Humiliated, ruined by the usurer from whom she borrowed for expensive gifts and wardrobe, she dies a suicide.

2. "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy (1878).

Anna is married to an irreproachable high government official, Karenin, who is also obstinate, habitually ironic and unable to express emotion. She finds his appearance repellent. Then Anna meets Vronsky, a dashing cavalry officer, and the attraction is immediate. Soon she is pregnant. Karenin offers her a divorce, but a mixture of pride and scruples causes Anna to reject it. Instead she lives "in sin" with Vronsky. Good society ostracizes Anna, forcing her and Vronsky to rely on their own resources. He is bored by this mode of existence. Increasingly jealous and unreasonable, fearing that she has lost Vronsky's love, Anna throws herself under a train.

3. "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James (Scribner's, 1904).

This is, to my taste, the greatest of James's late novels. Adam Verver, a colossally rich American, finds for his beloved daughter Maggie the best available husband in the person of an attractive Italian nobleman, whom the reader will know only as the Prince. The wedding takes place in London, where Verver resides. Charlotte Stant, a splendid and impecunious American girl who was at Maggie's school, is an unexpected guest. She has been the Prince's mistress, and the liaison will continue not only after the Prince and Maggie's marriage but also after Charlotte's own marriage to Maggie's father. The Prince is a man who could make two women happy, but Charlotte is willfully indiscreet. She humiliates Maggie. The revenge Maggie takes is exquisite. It may preserve both marriages.

4. "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford (The Bodley Head, 1915).

The narrator of "The Good Soldier" is Dowell, a rich and obtuse American who is married to Florence. Theirs is a sexless marriage, in part because of her feigned heart condition. At a German spa, they meet an elegant English couple, Edward and Leonora. He is a retired army officer. The two couples immediately recognize each other as "good people"; they become inseparable and seemingly are happiest when together. Years later, Dowell learns the truth: Edward is a sexual predator, regarding women he is drawn to as a foreign territory he must conquer. Florence has been his mistress; the narrator could have become Leonora's lover; death and madness have been the accompaniment of these good people's idyll. The supreme irony of this ironic and exquisitely told tale is historical: In the interval between its composition, which began in 1913, and its publication two years later, the society that Ford Madox Ford so beautifully rendered perished on the early battlefields of World War I.

5. "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara (Harcourt, Brace, 1934).

A perfect short novel, "Appointment in Samarra" is set during Prohibition in fictitious Gibbsville in the anthracite mining region of Pennsylvania. There is nothing the reader might want to know about Gibbsville society that O'Hara does not communicate. Julian and Caroline English are a smart, attractive couple, but he starts drinking heavily on Christmas Eve and is very drunk the next night when, at a roadhouse and in full view of Caroline, he persuades the local mob boss's girlfriend to follow him outside to his car. After half an hour the woman returns; Julian has passed out in the car. That was plenty of time for backseat sex, but, this being the most American of stories, the encounter probably hasn't gone beyond clumsy heavy petting. It hardly matters. Twenty-four hours later Julian is dead in his Cadillac, the motor running, and the garage door and windows closed.

Mr. Begley's novels include "Wartime Lies" (1991) and "Shipwreck" (2003). His latest, "Matters of Honor," will be published by Knopf in January.

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