The Big Picture by Douglas Kennedy

Most men would be glad to have Ben Bradford's life.  He has a wife and two little boys.  He has a great job as an estate lawyer, one that allows the family to live in an upscale Connecticut suburb from which Ben rides the train every day into Manhattan. 

But this wasn't the life he had envisioned and under the surface it wasn't nearly as bright as it appeared to others.  His great job was tedious and it surely wasn't the one of being a photojournalist that he had expected to have.  He periodically catches glimpses of his college girlfriend on television as she managed to get her dream job and is now a foreign correspondent on television.  He makes a lot of money but they spend it all on various things that don't bring satisfaction for long.  His marriage has gone cold after the birth of his second son and he comes to realize that his wife, Beth, has found her own release in the form of a torrid affair with a local guy who pretends he is on the verge of a discovery as a photographer. 

Ben is thrown for a loop by his discovery of the affair and it makes him reexamine his entire life.  What does it add up to?  When a tragedy happens that could send him to prison it becomes easy for him to set up the appearance of his death and flee his life to try to start again.  He ends up in Montana and there he finds the success he never expected to find.  Can his new life really be the one he was meant to live?

Douglas Kennedy has written a story of adult disappointments and how our lives seldom turn out to be what we had fantasized they would be.  It showcases how difficult it is to make love last and how living for someone else can only ever bring heartbreak.  Whether or not we have the strength to grab our lives and make them fit what we wanted is the main question we all face.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.