The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn her second novel, THE DANGEROUS HUSBAND, Jane Shapiro continues the exploration of relationships between men and women she began in 1992's AFTER MOONDOG. Shapiro's new quirky, funny, and sad tale chronicles what happens when a smart and self-reliant but lonely woman marries the wrong man. The title character, an independently wealthy sociologist turned novelist named Dennis, can't get through the day without injuring himself, his wife, or various pets. The heroine, who narrates the story from a vantage point looking back over the course of their two-year relationship, makes her living as a photographer; she records the marriage in daily snapshots, yet her vision of the world becomes clouded by a haze of love. The two 40-year-old New Yorkers find each other at a friend's Thanksgiving dinner, where, the narrator says, "[a]s soon as we met, in short, we fell in love." Dennis has just lost his job in academia and plunges instead into writing a long-dreamed-of novel. Though he's clumsy, and her friends seem wary, she moves into his Brooklyn Heights brownstone and they soon marry. Weaving absurdity into a realistic narrative, Shapiro recounts life after the wedding. "We entered the bedroom and rushed each other. I was wearing a garter belt and stockings. He peeled the stockings off conscientiously, and he ripped them anyway. Of course I didn't yet know that every time my husband would touch my stockings, the whole time I'd be his wife, he would leave them in shreds." Dennis's foibles multiply. He smashes his head on a squash court, totals his Alfa Romeo, and burns himself smokingacigar. He morphs from a sexy, strong man to one who "stopped washing his hair daily, and sometimes slept on his hair so that he spent the following day with the demented look of a stuffed chick that's been mashed in a kid's Easter basket." By her first anniversary, the narrator often wakes