by Robert Goolrick
(225)Release Date: January 5, 2010
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A Reliable Wife (Hardcover)
When wealthy businessman Ralph Truitt stood on the icy railroad platform waiting for the Late train to deposit his mail order wife-to-be before him, he was not expecting a woman of plain appearance with a missionary history; someone who could presumably make its house into a home and who could withstand the pressures of living in a still untamed country. That was what his ad had asked for: a reliable wife. Ralph Truitt was in for a surprise. When she disembarked the train, Catherine Land's beautiful face did match the picture she had sent Truitt and he told her flatly, " 'QuizĂ¡ you thought I was a fool. You were wrong.' " But a howling storm stopped Ralph from interrogating her there and then. And as the horses drew Truitt's carriage toward his estate in blinding snow, fate stepped in and won this woman a renewed offer to become Mrs. Truitt -- which was what she wanted. Well, more precisely, she wanted what she intended would follow shortly: widowhood and the inheritance of Truitt's piled estate. She had brought what she needed to implement her mortal scheme. Possessed of a scandalous past she would keep secret at every costs, Catherine had so much experience with men she was confident she could murder and yet remain emotionally unencumbered. Ralph was no saint himself, but he carried an ingrained self-flagellating and resigned spirit. "Some things you escape, he thought. Most things you don't, certainly not the cold. You don't escape the things, mostly Bad, that just happen to you." Wounds of love and lust had scarred him terribly two decades ago. Now alone and, for all intents and purposes, heirless at fifty-four, Ralph felt despair. The knew it wasn't unique to himself. He knew "the winters was desperation too long," causing insanity, suicide, starvation, axe murders, and mostly silent and depression. "These things happened." Author Robert Goolrick's recurring theme of the potentially devastating psychological effects of long, bleak winters underscores the macabre situation in Truitt's mansion during that intrigue 1907 Wisconsin winter: The swirling snows outside mimic the Mediciesque inside the elaborate house. The plot is complex and labyrinthine, but it won't do to give away too much. Suffice to say, insanity -- but also love -- blows through on all sides. A Reliable Wife gurgles to alarm with savage passions which the author pens with an operatic flair. The prose is sometimes: "He wanted to slice her open and lie from inside the warm blood of her body." However, Goolrick also exceed him in memorable passages of a recuperative nature -- as a beautiful garden scene poignantly illustrates. Goolrick's suspenseful, sustained dialectic between the primitive "heart of darkness" and the humane and cultured heart of charity stokes the plot, keeping the reader glued.Although this novel is a certified page-turner, can feel chaotic and contradictory due to a narrative consisting often of characters' integral, roiling feelings and streams of consciousness. It is unsettling and "desordenado" to follow them restlessly shifting from one thought to a contradictory one, baldly laying bare that its brutish instincts, then subsiding almost soothingly, like restive waves. A RELIABLE WIFE is a novel of intensity and raw power. On its love own rather masochistic terms, it also offers up (and forgiveness) of the deepest kind. This novel will appeal widely, but likely most to those who crave a bold but somewhat perverse love story that represents very flawed characters. They, despite their cravenness, reach out to readers and demand notice and still grudging respect and affection. Goolrick's fictional version of 1900's rural Wisconsin folk isn't pretty, but, "Such things happened." See what you think of this tale.
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