What do you do when you’re in your 50s and have been laid off, your house is about to be foreclosed on and you’re on the brink of bankruptcy and divorce? If you’re Art and Marion Fowler, the couple in Stewart O’Nan’s endearing new novel, you head for Niagara Falls and try to beat the odds.

The Fowlers, from Cleveland, have been married for 30 years and are the parents of two grown children. They decide that before their world implodes they will take their remaining life savings of $20,000 and head to the Canadian side of the falls, where they spent their honeymoon. There, booked into the bridal suite at a posh casino on Valentine’s Day weekend, they will try to repair their financial situation and their marriage. It’s a gamble on both counts.

The Odds: A Love Story will strike more than a few chords for long-married baby boomers. While O’Nan’s previous works —even his Emily Alone, about an 80-year-old woman’s end of life experiences — are relevantly appealing to readers of all ages, his latest will find more appreciation among the middle-aged, who will appreciate its honest and raw depiction of what marriage can be like after many years.

Art is more committed to the mission than Marion is; she’s ambivalent at best, wary and still bitter over an affair Art had 20 years earlier. “She was tired of being the wronged wife, the one he’d settled for out of guilt.” Divorce to her doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. Art, meanwhile, still rues the affair and the heartbreak he caused. “Being eternally guilty, he was eternally defenseless against her, which fed a resentment he knew he wasn’t entitled to, leaving him nothing with which to counter her anger but impatience and, after so long, exhaustion.” They get along fine one minute and squabble the next, as Art tries mightily to keep things upbeat and romantic. He’s got his work cut out for him, because “(s)he had a genius for self-pity that defeated even his.”

At night they dress to the nines (despite the “invisibleness of gray middle age”), drink too much and hit the casino’s roulette wheels, but during the day Art leads them on a tour of the falls and the magnificent ice-bound gorge that is a metaphor for the couple’s frosty marriage. When they take the Journey Behind the Falls excursion, the underground viewing portals are frozen over, much to Art’s dismay at paying to see nothing. But on an outdoor observation deck, the winter scene is breathtaking. “To the right, the Falls dropped frothing from directly above, shedding waves of spray which caked the cliff face with built-up ice the glacial blue of windshield wiper fluid and fringed the opening with gnarled, waxy stalactites. The rainbow, like the sky, seemed bigger here, brighter, right on top of them.”

Rescuing themselves from bankruptcy and saving their marriage would appear to be insurmountable tasks to complete in a weekend, and whether they will succeed is the suspenseful thread that O’Nan weaves so skillfully, primarily because he gets this rocky middle-age relationship so right. They’re weary, they’ve got regrets and resentments that go as deep as Niagara Falls, but they’ve had good times, too. While waiting in line for a carriage ride, they watch a just-married couple board as friends and family cheer and toss confetti. “How young they were, how new,” Marion thinks. “Today they were celebrities, set apart like royalty. She remembered the feeling and felt sorry for them, knowing it wouldn’t last, and yet, when they left . . . . she applauded along with the rest of the line.”

The novel is not without O’Nan’s trademark humor, subtly sprinkled throughout. In one scene, the couple attends a concert by the popular ’70s band, Heart, and find themselves surrounded by other middle-agers. “The crowd (was) singing along so loudly he could barely pick out the vocals. It was like being trapped in a giant karaoke bar on Heart night.” Most of the concert is like that until “the band played another new song nobody cared about.”

The Odds is a fast read, delightful in its candor and moving in its perceptiveness: “The happiest she’d ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?” Yes or no, love and marriage are a gamble, and life is all about beating the odds.

Amy Canfield is a writer in Portland, Maine.