By Eric Wilson
GENRE: DRAMA/FICTION
PUBLISHER: ALGONQUIN BOOKS
PUBLICATION DATE: MARCH 31, 2009
I love dark, brooding fiction. I don’t like too much romance or drama, and I appreciate tense prose, such as that found in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek.
After seeing this book on displays in numerous bookstores, after reading the passel of glowing endorsements, I was drawn into this spiderweb of semi-literary, fully dysfunctional, self-absorbed storytelling. Robert Goolrick is no slouch as a writer, although his disjointed style might be jarring to some. It settled into a rhythm that worked for me, but just as it was picking up steam, both of the main characters reveal themselves to be selfish, sexually twisted, individuals. In this way, they deserve each other. In this way, I hoped one or both might reap the harvest of their deceptive ways.
Goolrick never gives us that pleasure. While his characters use and abuse, we are dragged along through the muck of their minds and actions. I don’t mind reading of dysfunction, or of truly disturbed people, but where A Reliable Wife stumbles is in its insistence that we care about one or both of these characters. We are forced to choose sides–or, even worse, to have no side at all. It’s akin to being friends with a couple who both want to tell you their secrets, who both are doing much to harm the other, and who both want you to justify their actions.
I stopped caring halfway through. I am sorry I believed the hype.
Review copy provided courtesy of Algonquin Books
