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FIVE BEST
Book Ends
Before you leave your spouse, leaf through these volumes.

BY RAOUL FELDER
Saturday, February 11, 2006 12:01 a.m.

1. "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.

Women entering the divorce wars would do well to worry less about Feng Shui and more about Sun Tzu. An impressive blueprint for battlefield victory, this ancient Chinese military treatise addresses, with marvelous succinctness, matters like the importance of vision, discipline and planning--all of which also happen to be central to the outcome of divorce-court warfare. As Sun Tzu observes, much warfare is based on deception: "When about to attack, we must seem unable." But the book's most telling message may be that to fight and conquer is not supreme excellence. Rather, supreme excellence lies in the capacity to "break the enemy's resistance without fighting." An especially relevant piece of wisdom for divorce warriors. Like all blueprints, of course, this one is only as good as its readers' capacity to behave as directed.

2. "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy (1877).

The technical people--which is really what divorce lawyers are--have, alas, limited insight into the motivation that propels divorce cases. But Tolstoy, who so famously opened "Anna Karenina" by observing that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," may be an more apt teacher than any psychiatrist or court precedent. Anna has beauty, social position, wealth, a husband and an adored son. Still, her life seems empty--until, yielding to her passionate nature, she begins an affair with a dashing officer, Vronsky. Anna asks for a divorce, her husband refuses, then later relents, but she demurs. It all ends tragically, of course, but this greatest of novels is an immortal portrait of the conflicts inherent in the breakup of a marriage.

3. "Too Far to Go" by John Updike (Fawcett Crest, 1979).

In this collection about a couple called the Maples, whose marriage is quietly disintegrating, one story, "Separating," stands out for its grasp of the issue that resonates in almost every divorce case. The issue is a question, really: Why? Years after their divorce, people often still have no answer. In this magnificent, if emotionally crushing, tale, Joan and Richard Maple have come to the long planned weekend when the children are to be told. Richard spends the day before working around the house, thinking on the unbearable. "Beyond four knifelike walls a new life waited for him vaguely." The agonies multiply, none worse than those that come with the passionate, the crucial, word--"why?"--whispered in his ear by his grown son.

4. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" by John Milton (1643).

The author of "Paradise Lost" was moved to write these divorce tracts after his wife, Mary, deserted him a short eight weeks into their marriage. It was, for his time, a radical document, particularly its argument (to Parliament) that incompatibility should be grounds for divorce and that both partners should have the right of remarriage. Most interesting to the modern reader, perhaps, is Milton's view that the chaste and modest are more likely to find themselves "chained unnaturally together" in unsuitable unions than those who have, in youth, lived worldlier lives and enjoyed the kind of varied experience that enabled them to choose partners wisely. Not for nothing did the outraged Presbyterian Church mount a blistering response.

5. "The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Specifically, "The Wife of Bath's Tale," which, speaking to us from the 14th century, reveals a truth known to every couple and divorce lawyer. It's the story of a rapist knight who can save his life, he is told, only if he can discover what women most desire. When an old and ugly woman tells him the secret (women most want sovereignty over their husbands) and then demands that the saved rapist marry her, he accedes. Whereupon he finds the crone transformed into a great beauty--a proof of the timeless truth that people who marry seldom know who and what they are getting. That's why we invented prenuptial agreements.

Mr. Felder's most recent book is "Bare Knuckle Negotiation" (Wiley, 2004).

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