Customer Reviews

Some Instructions to My Wife

The nameless narrator of Stanley Crawford's book has something in common with today's survivalists of Ruby Ridge and the Republic of Texas. Isolated in his hillside homestead, growing most of his own food, he would create the perfect family -- Husband, Wife, Son, and Daughter. Not at all a conventional narrative, "Some Instructions..." is his guidebook to the good life.

And what a regimented, joyless life it is. Attached to the back of every cupboard door is a list of the cupboard's contents. For his daughter, still a toddler, he has prepared a toy washing machine for doll clothes. The warmth that he must have felt for his wife, at least once, breaks through in shadowy asides and subordinate clauses.

Crawford himself is a grower (read his nonfiction "A Garlic Testament") and his narrator shows the farmer's wisdom in the chapter "Waiting."

But his narrator is pathetically trapped in his own control fantasy. By giving his son a bicycle and toy cars, he somehow expects the boy to extrapolate to driving the real thing. In his ridiculous fight to protect his children from all harm, he reveals the helplessness that every parent feels.

The joke of this book may wear a little thin, after a while. But it is a fascinating look at certain ideas carried to their logical conclusion and beyond: home schooling, living in harmony with the land, "family values." This is an interesting, scary, and peculiar book.