Book of the Week: "A Reliable Wife" by Robert Goolrick

We may have forgotten, in this age of romantic comedy and chick lit, that fairy tales can be quite (pardon the pun) grim. While the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" (based on this book) is an excellent example of what trials a would-be Romeo may undergo to reach his Juliet, more often than not, the first 2/3 of a modern fairy tale is as lighthearted as its finale.

Not so in A Reliable Wife, the second book and first novel from author Robert Goolrick. Its prose unspools like a fever dream that is at once lushly detailed, hugely complicated, yet completely logical. Each character in this fable is hiding something from someone else, and when you don't know what that something is, that character's actions seem bizarre. When secrets are revealed, the actions remain bizarre -- but the motivations? Older than the tales human beings tell to keep the dark at bay. 

Of course, it all starts with a woman. That's as old as those tales, too (hello, Eve!). We watch Catherine Land, en route for Chicago to deepest Wisconsin, shed her city finery and identity on the train and emerge plain, blinking in the harsh winter sunlight with the bewilderment of a newborn. Catherine has come to the frozen north to meet her bridegroom Ralph Truitt, who is the only one she wishes to impress with her put-on naivete. In reality, Catherine's past wasn't shed with her silk stockings, nor did she want it to be. Her "dowry" is a blue glass bottle of arsenic, with which she intends to slowly poison her new husband so that she can inherit his considerable lumber fortune and return to her preferred louche life.

In Catherine's new home, playing hide the bottle creates initial tension, and initial "Oh, so she'll be found out!" expectations. But the bottle and its whereabouts pale in comparison to Ralph's real reason for wanting Catherine around -- and to her real reason for marrying him. 

Goolrick's writing style is at once hypnotic and understated. Each word has its place, yet the words follow each other so surely and without the reader pausing to breathe, let alone look up, that the novel creates its own kind of "snow blindness." Truitt's obsession with snow and how he believes it affects his neighbors is a theme that runs throughout the book. If Catherine could not, from her citybound life, imagine that luxuries like Truitt's china and hothouse foods could exist in the bleak tundra she comes to, she is utterly unable to understand the madness and cruelty that also exists in the small community. Truitt understands that people can be far from what they seem. He's taken aback by Catherine's beauty, and yet accepts it for what it is without looking too far into her character.

Or so Goolrick leads us to think. Every chapter of A Reliable Wife reveals unreliable characters and their past sins. Every chapter of A Reliable Wife also contains sex, so much sex that the act of intercourse might as well be deemed a character in its own right, so much sex that it's a wonder the snows don't melt and send new rivers south to sate the parched souls of the disenfranchised everywhere. 

If it seems as if I'm not giving you much, not explaining much -- well, that's because one of the most remarkable things about this remarkable novel is that figuring out explanations is part of each reader's job. Is Catherine a coldhearted sybarite, or the victim of circumstance whose tenderness towards Ralph shows him real love? Is Ralph a calculating magnate, or an affection-starved case of arrested development? Of course both might be either, both, or neither. Goolrick's fictional shell game includes a suspicious housekeeper, an evil rake, an abandoned mansion, and even -- yes! A neglected yet fertile garden. It's all Edenic. Especially the snakes. 

A Reliable Wife has potboiler elements, but they're cloaked in that aforementioned mesmerizing prose. Once you start reading, you'll be hooked -- just in time to wait eagerly for the Columbia Pictures adaptation that's already planned.