Bleak Midwinter in "A Reliable Wife"

Creepy. Depraved. Uncomfortable. Absorbing. Just a few words we came up with at the Fab 5 Book Club after reading A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. We could only wonder what sort of man would come up with a book like this, and we decided that the man on the jacket flap was not someone we'd want to run into alone on a dark street. He has quite an imagination.

Wealthy Ralph Truitt lives in an isolated Wisconsin town in the 19th century. The town is named Truitt, after his father and his father's business. He is desperately lonely. He places an ad in several newspapers, and he makes a tentative agreement with Catherine Land, a young woman who professes to be a simple, honest woman. She is nothing of the sort.

Catherine must adjust to rural Wisconsin, where, apparently, people are killing or maiming themselves or others with alarming regularity. The winter drives them crazy, and they just go off. Barbara checked into this with a friend who lives in that area, and she said that is still true. So, the first moral of the story is, be careful where you move in Wisconsin.

Interestingly, the author says he came to this character and town because of Kohler, Wisconsin, where one of our members just took a tour of the Kohler factory. Goolrick wondered what it would be like to live in a town named after you and where most of the town is employed by your company in some way.

Ralph and Catherine find a quiet passion for each other, but Ralph is tormented by his past and the son for whom he's been searching for a long time. And Ralph is aware that Catherine isn't the woman she professes to be. There is a lot of imagery of birds, sometimes caged, sometimes free, and we have only vague notions that this connects with the characters in the book. Sonya was annoyed that there is a red canary, because there is no such thing. Just ask her.

This book is like a classic gothic novel, after it's been turned into an HBO special. While there is a sort of redemption in the story, you have to read through so much obsessive sex and deviance to get there that the redemptive value is minimal. Still, the book grips you because you want to see what happens.

Would we recommend it to others? Not so much. Sonya would prefer to not have some images stuck in her head. Yet we all finished the book in a very timely manner, a rare occasion in this group. And the author's description in the interview at the back of Nancy's book made it sound much more profound than we had thought. Still. Pretty creepy.

If you enjoyed the V.C. Andrews books that no one could get enough of when I was in high school, the Flowers in the Attic series, you might enjoy this. I did not read them--I was too busy reading my sister's romance novels. Sonya remembers being freaked out by The Amityville Horror, and Barbara found the Harry Potter books a bit spooky. Barbara should not read The Amityville Horror.

Which led us to talk about TV shows that creeped us out. Sonya and Nancy watched a lot of X-Files, and I personally never quite recovered from Twin Peaks. My husband Brian's impression of a certain giant speaking as a small person danced on stage can still send me running for cover. And lights.

Then we talked about TV shows, in general, that we've liked--Mad About You, Northern Exposure, Frasier, and Lost. Which led to Nancy letting us in on her current favorite commercial, which features two hamsters driving a box and dressed like rappers. We are not sure if this is really a commercial or if the weird book we just read led to even stranger dreams.

As you can see, we are a literary crowd with a high level of intellectual discussion regarding books. In our defense, we are all very tired.