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.

The Hunger Games Wrap Up

Well. I can breathe again. I've been immersed in the latest, and last, installment of the Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins.

Now, what to say about it. Without giving anything away!

As grim as the premise is, the first two books struck me as keeping a little distance from the gore that resulted from the story. I didn't often have to look closely at the suffering of those who died. I thought that was in good keeping with the themes of oppression and abuse of power. Life is sacred, that the suffering of someone you do not know still matters, and the reason for the violence in the story was to point that out. It wasn't necessary to witness every gruesome detail.

Mockingjay is much more grisly. This is a book about war, and it spares us little. Reading the trilogy as a whole, I think that this book continues to push the reader to examine the effects of war, violence, and abuse of power. Indeed, it's impossible to miss those effects. While this does not diminish my estimation of the series--I don't believe that "nice" stories are the only ones worth reading--it does make me reconsider what age group for which I'd recommend them. A mature 12 or 13 year old can probably handle this, but there are many disturbing images, and I'd be cautious who I share them with. That said, my 11-year-old started reading The Hunger Games yesterday, and now I'm wondering if that was such a great idea! At least, having read them myself, I can talk about the books with her.

I heard Suzanne Collins on NPR last year when Catching Fire came out, and I believe she said that she came up with the idea for this series when she was channel-surfing and flipped between a story on child soldiers and a reality show. She says that if you combine the two, you get gladiators. The commentator asked her about the darkness and violence in the story, and she said something to the effect that we don't give children enough credit for knowing and interpreting the world we live in. She says that violence finds its way into their lives. We want to candy coat it, but they know better.

Certainly, if they read this series, they will know better. They'll also be offered various ways to look at violence and oppression. One choice is to use it as a sick sort of entertainment--picking favorites, watching disaster, getting a secret thrill from the proceedings--be it war between two entities, an exploitative reality game show, an epic disaster. Another choice is to shut it out, pretend it doesn't exist, and live our happily, relatively luxurious lives in ignorance. A third choice is to feel true compassion and reach out for change.

Another theme that is particularly strong in the third installment is the cost of survival. Whether helpless victims, unwilling participants or idealistic revolutionaries, surviving violence takes its toll on everyone. Coming into power changes people. And in particular, killing another human being (or many) changes a person profoundly. Given her initial impulse for the books, a story on child soldiers, this last theme makes perfect sense and is made painfully clear to the reader. It's hard for me to imagine someone "enjoying" the violence in the story in the same way as a spectacular special effects moment in an action movie. All of the characters, whether on the side of the heroine or not, are presented as human and cannot be dismissed lightly.

Mockingjay is a powerful book. Looking through discussions online, I see that much of the speculation surrounding it has to do with whether the heroine Katniss will end up with either Gale or Peeta. While I enjoyed speculating about that myself, readers looking for the Jacob/Edward tension of the Twilight books or the Pam/Jim progression of "The Office" should look elsewhere. This is a book about the pain of being manipulated, the horror of war and the horrible choices one is forced to make in such situations, where few are innocent and everyone has a motivation of his or her own.

Collins keeps the reader wrapped in the tension, refusing to allow readers to take a break when the chapter ends.

And while the novel is grim, it does offer hope. There are also brief moments of beauty. As a parent, I'd like to see that hope and beauty show up a bit earlier or in larger doses for my child. Contrarily, as a reader myself, I feel that any more would just negate the horror that the characters experience. And let's not delude ourselves--there are horrors, as well as beauty, everywhere. So, how will we respond? If we ignore the suffering in the world, can we truly appreciate the beauty? And if we constantly view horror while feeling ourselves detached and safe from it, how long will it be until we are so jaded that we can't see it for what it is?