A Reliable Wife [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Robert Goolrick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2009

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt — a passionate man with his own dark secrets —has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.

With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

The Boston Globe described A Reliable Wife as “a historical potboiler, an organic mystery rooted in the real social ills of turn-of-the-century America.” Certainly, the novel’s characters have their share of secrets and motives while illuminating the social milieu of early 20th-century rural Wisconsin and Gilded Age St. Louis. Psychologically driven, the novel boasts an unusual depth of characters and hypnotic, if at times overly sensuous, prose. Indeed, noted the Washington Post, it is “a gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower.” A few critics predicted the final twist, but that did not detract from their praise for this riveting novel of love, loss, forgiveness—and human connection.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1 edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125967
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125964
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (954 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #549,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Most of my life has been fairly thoroughly explored in my earlier memoir, THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. I was born in a small university town in Virginia, a town in which, besides teaching, the chief preoccupations were drinking bourbon and telling complex anecdotes, stories about people who lived down the road, stories about ancestors who had died a hundred years before. For southerners, the past is as real as the present; it is not even past, as Faulkner said.

I went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and then lived in Europe for several years, thinking that I would be an actor or a painter, two things for which I had a passion that outran my talent. I wrote an early novel, and then my parents disinherited me, so I moved to New York, which is where small-town people move to do and say the things they can't do or say at home, and I ended up working in advertising, a profession that feeds on young people who have an amorphous talent and no particular focus.

Fired in my early fifties, the way people are in advertising, I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I came back around to the pastime that had filled the days and nights of my childhood: telling complex anecdotes about the living and the dead. I think, when we read, we relish and devour remarkable voices, but these are, in the end, stories we remember.

I live in a tiny town in Virginia in a great old farmhouse on a wide and serene river with my dog, whose name is Preacher. Since he has other interests besides listening to my stories, I tell them to you.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

449 of 507 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "Such things happened." March 24, 2009

By K. M. VINE™ VOICE

Format: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 expecting a woman of plain appearance with a missionary history; someone who could presumably make his 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 didn't match the picture she had sent Truitt and he told her flatly, " ' Maybe 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 amassed estate. She had brought what she needed to implement her deadly scheme. Possessed of a scandalous past she would keep secret at all 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. He knew it wasn't unique to himself.... He knew "the winters were too long," causing insanity, suicide, starvation, axe murders, and mostly silent desperation 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 1907 Wisconsin winter: The swirling snows outside mimic the Mediciesque intrigue 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 seethes with savage passions which the author pens with an operatic flair. The prose is sometimes alarming: "He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body." However, Goolrick also excels in memorable passages of a recuperative nature -- as a beautiful garden scene poignantly illustrates. Goolrick's suspenseful, sustained dialectic between the primal "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, it can feel chaotic and contradictory due to a narrative consisting often of characters' uncensored, roiling feelings and streams of consciousness. It is unsettling and "messy" to follow them restlessly shifting from one thought to a contradictory one, baldly laying bare their brutish instincts, then subsiding almost soothingly, like restive waves.

A RELIABLE WIFE is a novel of intensity and raw power. On its own rather masochistic terms, it also offers up love (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 featuring very flawed characters. They, despite their cravenness, reach out to readers and demand notice and even 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. Read more ›

216 of 252 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars These books happen... February 17, 2010

By a discriminating reader

Format:Paperback

but I wish they wouldn't. A prosaic, uninspired, embarrassing attempt at literary fiction which falls flat. The writing is overwrought and repetitive, the sentences sound like they come from a second grader ("We've lived the lives we've made. I've lost. You've lost. This memory you have. It was sweet for such a short time. We've behaved badly. To each other. In the world. It's over. We're over. It's got to stop.") - Yikes! The author's favorite word is "languid," which pops up over and over (and over and over). Hey, get a thesaurus.

The plot is thin and boring, the most interesting element in the beginning with the runaway horses episode. Inconsistencies abound. And I just can't care about any of the unlikable one-dimensional characters, whose colors change on every page, sometimes within a paragraph, from absorption-love-desire-regret-bitterness-hate back to bitterness-regret-desire-love-absorption.

Easily, this is in my list of the worst books I have read. As a librarian, I will not be recommending this to my reading public. Don't waste your time - I did, so you don't have to.

210 of 253 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars A "bodice ripper" soap opera. May 2, 2009

By C. L. Burchard

Format:Hardcover

After hearing the author interviewed on NPR, I was intrigued and immediately bought the book. I read it in two days, but after a few chapters, I was pulled along by nothing more than a desire to find out what would happen. I disliked the story and the writing at almost every stage. Nothing about the book is believable, least of all the characters' over-the-top "raging" passions. Don't waste your time unless you like "bodice ripper" soap operas.

128 of 153 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Predictable, Implausible and Really Bad April 28, 2009

By Been there, done that

Format:Hardcover

My goodness. I can't believe the excellent reviews this book has received. I bought it, read it, and returned it for a full refund.
The characters are awkward, the plot is awkward, the writing is awkward, the sex scenes are awkward, even the names of the characters are awkward (Ralph Truitt, Catherine Land, Antonio Moretti as the bastard "son"). The musings of the unsympathetic, boring and unimaginative characters seem to go on forever, and the story is just ridiculous. I kept waiting for the plot twist that never happened.
If you actually care about not knowing what will happen in this predictable, implausible and downright silly book, don't read any further.....
For starters, the characters are unlikeable stereotypes. Even the dead ones, like the mother, the sister, the wife...As for the live ones? (The caretakers? Stereotypes.) Well, you know exactly what Catherine's past is when she's sitting on the train. If her clothes weren't a dead giveaway, her thoughts about the appearance of her train car tell you everything you need to know. Truitt's incessant moping about sex is just as predictable and boring. It's not even pathetically sad. It's just boring. So, the two main characters' respective tragic pasts are not exactly exciting, or even remotely interesting.
As for the plot: Again, when it isn't completely predictable, it's implausible. The writer virtually copies a scene right out of Jane Eyre, so that Catherine can ingratiate herself with Truitt shortly after they meet. The sister dies a Dickensian death. The attempt to make Truitt and Catherine's meeting less of an accident is so contrived as to be absurd. The near and actual deaths - equally predictable and contrived.... Why wouldn't the wealthy Truitt hire private investigators to check her out before he sends for her, just as he hired PI's to find his long-lost "son"? Why would he send his new young wife to town to fetch Antonio? Why wouldn't Antonio just go take all Truitt's money and leave, instead of going through the trouble to set Catherine up to poison Truitt? How did they even know Truitt would select her as the mail-order bride to get the whole poisoning scheme in place? Why would Truitt know that she's poisoning him and just shrug it off - it's okay, just don't let me suffer, dear, while you're killing me? And the chase scene at the end, where Antonio ends up on the ice? Gee, I wonder what's going to happen to him? The list of absurdities goes on and on.
I was up all night reading this book, waiting for something interesting to happen, waiting to actually care about somebody - anybody - in the story. What an unfulfilling reading experience this was.
At least I got my money back. Read more ›