For that matter, when Mr. Rushdie is writing about Shalimar and his doomed marriage to Boonyi, his usually vigorous prose has a way of turning clotted and clichéd.

(George Jones and Tammy Wynette lived next door for a few years, during the happy stretch of a doomed marriage.)

Limning the demise of a doomed marriage, Mr. Chinlund and Ms. Perez strike some hot, nasty sparks.

The festival will feature a musical about Gen X (it's called, wouldn't you know, "APATHY") and another about the doomed marriage of Charles and Diana.

The combination truly stings, and for just that moment, you believe in the doomed marriage in "The Last Five Years."

Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Cerveris share a doomed marriage in "Hedda Gabler."

They correct Krasner's romantic fabrications and distortions about her relationship with Pollock, and they trace the ups and downs of their doomed marriage with a good deal of fairness toward Krasner.

The story of a young novelist and his wife traveling in Spain and France in the 1920's, it presents a picture of a doomed marriage, sexual ambiguity and creativity in crisis.

"They had attempted only one thing," he writes in "The Portrait of a Lady" of the doomed marriage of the unwitting Isabel and the malevolent Osmond, "but that was to have been exquisite."

In fact, by the end of this solipsistic book, the reader has begun to feel every bit as suffocated and claustrophobic as Mr. Franzen and his estranged wife apparently did in their doomed marriage.