Sam and Angie is all about alienation – about living on the surface of events. It’s also about the inner world of a marriage that is unravelling. The mood of the book is disturbing and disorienting; the characters move through their lives without emotional connections. Unfortunately, it is not only the characters that are disconnected – the reader loses contact too.

Sam and Angie are thirtyish, rich, and have been married to each other for 13 years. They eat well, dress well, live in Sam’s glass house, and inhabit a TV-like world of short, unresolved encounters. Angie is a criminal lawyer who says she loves her work. She also says she loves Sam. But it’s hard to figure out just what Angie feels. She is attracted to one of her clients – a beautiful, well-dressed fellow named Patrick – but it’s not clear that the affair ever gets off the ground. And she claims to care about a teenager that she is defending against a charge of rape and murder, but she doesn’t seem to connect with him either.

Then there’s Sam, the classic dark brooding type – a rich businessman who travels the world and has a modern aluminum and black office in “a prairie city.” Sam has just been defrauded by his business partner (who was also his best friend) and is now completely isolated from everyone but Angie. He is spying on her, showing up to watch her in court and tailing her in his car, but Angie barely notices. He goes through her papers and reads her journal, but Angie doesn’t seem to mind much.

Winnipeg author Margaret Sweatman’s writing is so loaded with metaphors, similes, and obscure adjectives that reading it is like trying to find one’s way through a heavy mist. Just when you feel that you are about to understand something about a character or about the plot, a cloud of words gets in the way. And the story unfolds excruciatingly slowly and obscurely until, by the end, it is not clear just what has or has not happened. Reading this book was a lot of work and neither the plot nor the characters were worth it.