Giving the lie to Tolstoy: Tim Parks story Bedtimes

Starting to notice Tim Parks, an English writer who has fallen below my radar at least, but who now has had two very good recent stories in NYer, and quite different from each other in fact; really admired his story from earlier in the year, Vespa, which was an account of teenage love crossing social-class boundaries and centered on a stolen Vespa and the mysterious attempts to get the bike returned and restored, a very fresh voice and very credible - while his current NYer story, Bedtimes, is a short one, only 2 pp., and focuses on a middle-aged couple in a strained marriage. The story consists of brief passages about each bedtime for the couple over the course of a week; it has a deceptively flat and unengaged tone - you read the first "bedtime" and think so what, man and woman go up to the bedroom at different times and don't speak much to each other. But subtly Parks we've in some themes and issues - wife suspecting husband of an affair, husband awkwardly trying to build rapport w/ college-age daughter and teenage son, husband yearning sexually for indifferent wife. From the outside, seen "objectively," it's seems to be a happy family - kids get along very well, parents take them out for burgers, movies, a visit to a pub - but the glimpses we get of the inside of the marriage, those private and discrete moments, bedtimes, together but apart, we see the faults and fissures and looming catastrophes. In a sense, this story gives the lie to Tolstoy's famous though simplistic observation: even "happy" families are different, unique, subject for literature.