A Reliable Wife (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: Reliable Wife, Ralph Truitt, Saint Louis (more...)

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.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Don't be fooled by the prissy cover or that ironic title. Robert Goolrick's first novel, "A Reliable Wife," isn't just hot, it's in heat: a gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower. This is a bodice ripper of a hundred thousand pearly buttons, ripped off one at a time with agonizing restraint. It works only because Goolrick never cracks a smile, never lets on that he thinks all this overwrought sexual frustration is anything but the most serious incantation of longing and despair ever uttered in the dead of night. The curtain rises in 1907 during a Wisconsin winter "cold enough to sear the skin from your bones." Ralph Truitt, the wealthiest man in town, stands frozen in place on a train platform, but inside he's burning with the unsated desire of 20 solitary years. Ralph is waiting for his mail-order bride, a woman he requisitioned through a classified ad: "Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical not romantic reasons. . . . Discreet." That may sound as horny as Sunday school, but Ralph isn't entirely what he seems, standing there on the platform with "his eyes turned downward, engraved with a permanent air of condescension and grief." Inside, the 58-year-old widower is startled by the intensity of his desires, consumed with thoughts of sex and murder and madness in homes all around town. "Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin," Goolrick writes. "He had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning." This first chapter, in which everything appears stock still, is told in a husky whisper of something lurid and painful, "the terrible whip of tragedy." Again and again, we hear this refrain, like a judgment and a curse: "These things happened." Keep this in mind as you're scanning the personal ads in the City Paper. When Catherine Land finally arrives, looking prim and dour, she isn't what she appears to be, either. She threw her extravagant party dresses out the train window a few miles from town, and she has hidden jewels in the hem of her black wool dress. She's not even the woman in the photo she sent Ralph during their summer of tentative correspondence. And she's carrying a bottle of arsenic and "a long and complicated scheme." Poor Ralph has some awfully bad luck with women: the matrimonial equivalent of sailing to Europe on the Titanic and flying home on the Hindenburg. "This begins in a lie," he tells Catherine sternly as he picks up her bags. "I want you to know that I know that. . . . Whatever else, you're a liar." All Ralph wants -- or pretends he wants -- is "a simple, honest woman. A quiet life. A life in which everything could be saved and nobody went insane." That's so hard to attain when your new bride hopes to poison you straightaway. But damned if he doesn't almost die in a spectacular riding accident while bringing her home from the station. Poor Catherine finds she's got to nurse Ralph back to health before she can start killing him. Don't worry: I'm not giving anything away. Neither of these two steely people is playing straight with the other, and Goolrick isn't playing straight with us, either. The floor collapses in almost every chapter, and we suddenly crash through assumptions we'd thought were solid. Goolrick keeps probing at the way people force themselves not to know something -- not to believe the truth -- in order to fulfill their deepest longings. The novel is deliciously wicked and tense, presented as a series of sepia tableaux, interrupted by flashes of bright red violence. The whole thing takes place in a fever pitch of exquisite sensations and boundless grief in a place where "the winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air." The word "alone" spreads through these pages like mold in the cellar, until it's everywhere. The stillness and whiteness of the Wisconsin setting eventually give way to the lush depravity of St. Louis, lined with music halls and opium dens. Much of this section takes place in "a tented, brocaded bedroom, like a palace abandoned before a revolution." I'm reluctant to quote much more for fear of making the book sound silly -- "Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart" -- but once you've fallen into the miasma of "A Reliable Wife," it's intoxicating. (Columbia Pictures has already grabbed the rights for what could be an inflammable movie.) I'm reminded of Edgar Allan Poe's stories with their claustrophobic atmosphere, hyper-maudlin tone and the extravagant suffering that borders on garishness. (Yes, Goolrick includes a forlorn castle, too.) These are all qualities the author displayed in his equally gothic memoir, "The End of the World as We Know It" (2007). But his inspiration for "A Reliable Wife" reportedly came from "Wisconsin Death Trip," a grim collection of antique photographs published in 1973. The editor of that book, Michael Lesy, reproduced pictures of children laid to rest and parents in shock, along with newspaper anecdotes about murder, illness, assault and insanity -- the same kinds of ghastly tales that obsess Goolrick's overheating characters. Ultimately, this bizarre story is one of forgiveness. But the path to that salutary conclusion lies through a spectacularly orchestrated crescendo of violation and violence, a chapter you finish feeling surprised that everyone around you hasn't heard the screams, too.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1 edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125967
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125964
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (183 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,701 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 124 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

50 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unputdownable, April 3, 2009

By	Luanne Ollivier - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I stayed up past my usual time last night, as I couldn't put down Robert Goolrick's latest, A Reliable Wife.

I was going to put down my thoughts first thing this morning, but was at a loss to put into words how amazing this book was.

It is set in 1907 rural Wisconsin, most of it during the harsh winter. Crime, mental illness and disease seem to be part of the accepted landscape. Goolrick in his end notes cites Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip as having a 'profound influence on the structure and genesis of his novel.' The darkness and madness of the surrounding town is referred to often, adding to the overall tone of the novel.

Ralph Truit is the patriarch of the town that bears his name. He owns everything and nearly everyone works for him. He has money and power, but not the thing he craves the most, that which he has denied himself for twenty years. Female companionship - a wife. He advertises in a newspaper for ' a reliable wife.'

" He had wanted a simple, honest woman. A quiet life. A life in which everything could be saved and nobody went insane."

Catherine Land answers that ad, describing herself as 'a simple, honest woman'. Ralph sends for her and she arrives to become his spouse. However Catherine is not quite what she has represented herself to be.

"She knew a good deal more about what was to happen than he did." " She knew the end of the story."

I don't want to give away any more of the plot. But it is more complicated than it seems at first glance. Two wounded hearts, both longing for what they can't or don't have, bring these two people together, isolated in a small pocket of madness, for better or worse.

The story itself is captivating, but it is the language that mesmerized me. Goolrick's writing is raw and powerful. Ralph's discourse on his wants and desires are simply beautiful. Catherine's disquistion on her life, desires and how she came to be what she is, is brutal in it's honesty.

I don't know what else to say, other than I was caught up in the story from first to last page. Highly recommended!

60 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your time, instead read Cornell Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness, May 4, 2009

By	Henry Underfoot - See all my reviews

I learned about this book while listening to NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. I am a big fan of Wisconsin Death Trip and as the interview unfolded I was shocked to hear Goolrick relate the basic plot and themes of Cornell Woolrich's brilliant and beautifully written (and out of print) Waltz into Darkness. I have since read A Reliable Wife and am convinced that the plot and themes were either directly lifted from Waltz Into Darkness or indirectly from movies based on the book (Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid and/or Original Sin) or both. In addition, there are subplots and scenes borrowed from Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Anna Karenina. This is indeed the most derivative piece of writing that I have ever read. For a really great read about turn-of-the century sexual obsession, madness, and murder; get a hold of Woolrich's Waltz into Darkness and don't waste your time on A Reliable Wife.