A Reliable Wife

Borrowing traumatic elements from his dysfunctional-childhood memoir, The End of the World As We Know It, ad-exec-turned-author Goolrick constructs a weighty psychodrama laced with Hitchcockian suspense in A Reliable Wife, his debut novel. Major motifs of Contemporary Lit 101 appear like flashing neon signposts throughout: Checkered pasts, dark secrets, psychosexual tension, rape and death all augment a partially effective smoke-and-mirrors plot. Influenced by the bizarre bucolic tragedies in Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, Goolrick's novel is set in 1907 against a similar rural Wisconsin backdrop. It's a nightmarish wasteland where people "went to bed well and woke up insane. Ran away. Hanged themselves."

Out of this bleak netherworld steps fiftysomething business tycoon Ralph Truitt. His wife and daughter have been dead for years, and his estranged son, Antonio, is a carousing neurasthenic in St. Louis. Tormented by guilt and loneliness, Truitt places a newspaper ad requesting "a reliable wife"; he gets Catherine Land, a woman with a sordid history and a bottle of arsenic. She plans to marry Truitt, poison him and live off his massive estate. Naturally, this is easier conceived than executed, even after the love story triangulates and brings in the conveniently patricidal Antonio.

Goolrick possesses enough humanist instinct to create a credible fictional world that's nevertheless devoid of joy, jokes or laughter. It's a literary hell where pain is described in generously sensuous terms, while sex is vague poetic abstraction. Yet underneath the book's preoccupation with human despair lies a hopeful—and trite—love-conquers-all message. And after some crafty diversionary tactics, A Reliable Wife's denouement becomes a surprisingly literal commentary on the spousal fidelity its title suggests.—Michael Sandlin

Goolrick reads Sun 29 and Tue 31

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