A Reliable Wife - A Review

Visceral stimulation is an understatement for the lingering feelings I have after finishing Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife.

I tore through this book like an in-n-out cheeseburger customized to my exact ravenous desire. It happens that my cheeseburger simile is an appropriate choice, as the subject matter of this book was in fact ravenous desire. Ravenous desire that consumes us, creates us, destroys us, and leads us from one day's dark into the next's light. There were moments while reading this too-short novel where I felt all was lost and there was no redemption to be found in the Tundra Heart of Northern Wisconsin's frozen terrain. But the snow did melt, and the jewels lost in the blinding snow storm were eventually found - survived the winter under ice though their value was ultimately depleted to nothing but the regret we all carry around with us.

This book is about three relationships between three people and the intricately woven ties that bind them. With every deception, wrong--and sometimes right--that is perpetuated by one against another, these ties grows stronger, all the more unbreakable. However, this tightening of the strings that hold these people together only serve to more tightly choke out any hope of freedom from the pain.

I don't know anything about Robert Goolrick, but I read his afterward, which he entitled "Beholden". It was a brief expression of gratitude to the author of a book he had written about the frozen Northern country during the "diseased end of the 19th century" and how the country--the rural and remote place that we think of without much thought--is actually a hothouse of people's interactions, destructions, love and loss. Madness and fury, lust and love, incest and iniquity, goodness and evil are part of all people - it is the human condition. The life of the country is not pristine and innocent: it is as horrific, complicated and beautiful as anywhere else. Where there are humans, there is the human condition.

A Reliable Wife is holding a spot in my top ten reads of 2010. This is going to be a contentious year.