THE MARRIED LAND, a work of high-seriousness, lusty humor, and a passion for life, tells the story of Daniel Byrne's return home to Greenville Mississippi where he finds a welter of confusion. As he struggles to restore it to some order, he faces the question of how the contradictions he finds -- family unravellings, polarities of North and South, black and white, rich and poor -- could have formed a time-defying union, a center in which opposites blend together in an anatomy of love.