A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

Were it not for a 1973 book by Michael Lesy entitled Wisconsin Death Trip, which showcased news reports and a collection of photographs that depicted the harsh Midwestern landscape and some of its residents who suffered mental illness, crime, and the claustrophobic effects of a winter that seems like it might never end, Robert Goolrick would never have found the inspiration to create a fictitious story of life in the frigid Wisconsin winter. I'll need to research Michael Lesy's book since it's clearly been influential for many. Not only has Wisconsin Death Trip been adapted into a film, there is also an album, and one of Stephen King's short stories, 1922, from the collection "Full Dark, No Stars" was also influenced by it.

It is 1907 and Catherine has arrived to Truitt, Wisconsin to marry Ralph Truitt, the namesake of the town and the man who owns everything in it. Everyone in the town works for him, and making money is both his work and his livelihood. He has no family to remember anymore, and Catherine is the start of a new life for him.

She will be his second wife, a wife he selected from hundreds of responses to an advertisement he placed in the paper. He's lived the past twenty years alone with regret, but he's always wanted a life like everyone else, a simple one in which he wakes up with a woman he loves and who loves him, and goes to sleep with her at night after making love. But this wish of a simple life may never be possible. He grew up with a religious fanatic who tormented him to show him what hell was like and he ended up marrying a woman who he caught cheating. He threw her out but kept their son, and beat him every day until he ran away.

Unbeknownst to him, Catherine isn't the innocent she's claimed to be. She brings a terrifying plan and secret that will ultimately put their arranged marriage to the ultimate challenge. While all of them are deplorable characters initially, it soon becomes clear that they are all just a product of their own difficult childhood. They've just made a sad mess of their adult lives.

At once quiet and thoughtful, exploring a different time and world, it is also loud, torrid and passionate. Frantic in its excesses of scene after scene of sex, it could be considered cheap and tasteless, the moments literally throbbing off the page with descriptions to make you blush. Instead, it provided harsh contrast to the quiet and brutal life in the wintery Midwest. Like the winter, sex is an important and symbolic part of the story. The primal passion ties Ralph's old life to his new one and while it could become tedious at times, I felt it made sense for the story's evolution.

What Robert Goolrick is trying to paint in this novel that was inspired by Wisconsin Death Trip (and I believe he succeeds) is the picture that life was extremely hard for those who suffered the Midwest winters over a hundred years ago, and that while horrible things happened, it was just part of life. The old adage of "it is what it is" seems appropriate. These tiny towns in America may have been unheard of on a map, but they carried the same tragedies as the big cities, and yet approached it with an almost quiet and clinical detachment. One spouse commits infidelity, another is murdered, and yet another family experiences a suicide. It is what it is. Funerals are attended, newspapers relay more horror, and the next day the town has yet another sad event to focus on.

For some, normal lives turned to nightmare. They starved to death in the horrible winters. They removed themselves from society and lived alone in ramshackle huts in the woods. They were found drooling and naked and were committed to the insane asylum at Mendota where they were wrapped in icy sheets and lashed with electrical currents until they could be restored to sanity and quietude. These things happened.

People either love or hate this book. I've found that when people hate it, it tends to be for one of two things (or both), which I can understand: Too much sex or choppy sentences. The argument for both is there since I thought there was a whole heck of a lot of intimacy described with everyone, but I never thought it was too much. The choppy sentences also were there, but I didn't find it troubling. In fact, there are several sections that are choppy, but actually blend fluidly. Here's an example of it, which I think works well:

They laughed. They spoke quietly, out of respect for what they know to be Ralph Truitt's failure. The train was late. They felt the snow in the air. They knew the blizzard would soon begin. Just as there was a day every spring when the women of the town, as though by some secret signal, appeared in their summer dresses before the first heat was felt, there was as well a day when winter showed the knife before the first laceration.

It's choppy, I know, but something about it resonates, particularly the comparison of when you first feel winter coming with "the knife before the first laceration."

With a marriage built on lies starting anew in a town that quietly accepts tragedy, A Reliable Wife is the stark and beautifully written story of life at the turn of the twentieth century. Taking the reader through Wisconsin and the seedy nightlife of St. Louis, Robert Goolrick's tale of two people and their hope for love, is haunting and compelling. I appreciated the writing and look forward to more from Robert Goolrick. I would recommend this in the printed version versus the audiobook, simply due to the sex. If you do listen to it, just remember to listen with your headphones on, or keep the windows up if you're in the car.

Fans of Patrick McGrath's modern Gothic stories, particularly Asylum, will like A Reliable Wife.

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This is my final selection for the RIP Challenge. You can read more RIP reviews from other participants by clicking here.