A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

As I sit here on a 737 jet from San Jose back to Seattle, surrounded by the breathing, living, real forms of my fellow passengers, touching the elbow of the elderly Asian woman sitting next to me each time I vigorously hit the spacebar, I start to float away to the world created by Robert Goolrick in A Reliable Wife. Set in Wisconsin in 1907-1909, the lush, opium-saturated, desperate characters are as real as the screaming baby in 19b, two rows ahead of me.

[You turn off the bloody yowling child, and I will turn off my portable electronic device, dammit!]

I'm typically a fantasy reader. After all, there is so much real life to escape from. Bills, intermittent and oh-so-Comcastic internet service, grocery deliveries, and morning traffic melt away when remembering the worlds I immerse myself in—though one might argue that having my head in Amber or Middle-Earth isn't the safest when merging into traffic on the 520E towards Seattle.

I am not quite sure how to classify A Reliable Wife. It's not fantasy, and not quite historical fiction. It's somewhere between a postmodern critique of Henry James and a tattered, lurid dime novel boasting a scantily-clad 'dame with swell gams' sprawled on a garish chaise-lounge.

Nevertheless, the work done by Goolrick is remarkable. Based on Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Catherine Land, a woman in her mid-30s, travels from St. Louis and her murky past to marry 54-year old Ralph Truitt, a wealthy, lonely Wisconsin industrialist she's never met. The town is never named, but it's a colorful portrait splashed in stark relief against the black and white shadings of a post-Industrial Revolution town in northern Wisconsin. It could be any broken-down factory town in flyover country, and is populated with two-dimensional archetypes existing only to show us how multifaceted the main three characters are.

Ralph Truitt has placed an ad in several newspapers looking for “A Reliable Wife”. One supposes this ad, somewhat more honest than your typical Craigslist fare of “SWM seeks fit, attractive SWF with career to become SAHW/HM; pix 4 urs” would bring all the nutjobs out, and, of course, it did—Catherine in particular. She has decided to marry Ralph and poison him with arsenic to acquire his fortune (this is on the back cover and is the first thing she thinks about; I’m not spoiling anything).

To add more in about Ralph's family and how Catherine relates to him would be to wreck parts of the story more than five pages in, which is against my general policy. I found the plot twists predictable, but not the ending. Not to say that the ending was not foreseeable—more that I believed that the descriptive, lush gloom of the rest of the novel demanded a more melodramatic end than, in fact, occurred.

I would say that there are three major plot twists. Functionally, all of them were predictable in the way that novels frequently are; Goolrick seems to have in a way done a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' novel. That is the worst of it. In a way, I'd say that his predictability is a function of how closely he has mirrored real life—his characters act in a way that I would have, which means that his very skill at the portrayal of life is what I am complaining about!

Now for the best of it. Catherine is a believable character in a way that many historical novels fail to capture. Her plight is standard, understandable, and heartrending. Her solution is typical but carried out in a very atypical fashion. I approve of Goolrick's prose, which passes the Goldilocks test. I also thought the pacing, glacial at times, accomplished what Goolrick wished it to, which is to startle us when he picks it up at the end to drive home the crashing end.

How to classify this novel? Any time there are steam engines and lavish costumes in a turn-of-the-century novel, there's a real temptation to label it Steampunk...but that's not right. In a way, though there is certainly a startling amount of melodrama, this isn't even a Gothic novel in the tradition of Shelley or Peake.

Though parts of the novel are, at least in memory, set in Europe, this is a thoroughly American novel. It is to European gothic novels as Gaiman's American Gods is to Dante's Inferno...that is to say, a stripped down, starkly drawn, twisted precis of rich source material.

So, thumbs up or thumbs down? I can't really say. Unlike the ongoing, loosely connected or sequential tales of my favorite pop authors, like Orson Scott Card or Kate Elliott or Patrick Rothfuss or Mercedes Lackey, A Reliable Wife was a standalone novel that doesn't require any other texts to comprehend; as a result, it neither improves upon nor drags down a series. Hence, there is no average to compare it with; this is Goolrick's first novel. I almost cannot provide a clear opinion on whether or not to purchase it, because I don't know enough about this incipient genre of postmodern historical fiction.

Robert Goolrick is not an author I will buy again. This is not because he has failed to achieve his purpose. It is more because I don't want any more of his mind in mine. Even my review of his book is twisted, unclear, filled with odd turns of phrase, and not in my typical style…and it’s all his fault! His Wisconsin was a dark place to go, full of uncomfortable truth and violent, real passion. I don't like reading about characters that are so full of reality, shame, fear, and desire. The closest fantasy equivalent is George RR Martin's ASong Of Ice And Fire, and I must say...I will only read that full tale one more time, when the final novel in the series has come out. I read to enjoy myself, to escape, to think, and to feel...and what I think and feel are the purpose of the activity. If I am too inwardly-directed, too consumed with trying to find out how closely these characters mirror my own soul, I cease to enjoy myself, and instead embark on a journey of self-questioning. Catherine and Ralph possessed motives that were clear, human, and extremely uncomfortable.

I'd rather read about elves.