A Reliable Wife

First, I need to say I have a total thing for mail order bride stories, specifically those of the West. They're kind of America's version of Cinderella. I even wrote my own version years ago. It's girly and romantic yeah, but being a girl I guess I don't have to apologize for that. The genre gets an entirely different spin though in Robert Goolrich's new novel, A Reliable Wife. In it, a desperate sporting woman responds to a Wisconsin man's ad for the reliable wife of the title with a sinister plan to win him, marry him then poison him, returning from the wilds a wealthy widow. What she hadn't figured on is that the man has designs of his own and their relationship becomes a sick and twisted dangerous dance with the reader never sure who will prevail.

It's a dark book, one I enjoyed as much as one can enjoy such a story. However, flashes of Goolrich's previous book, his memoir The End of the World as We Know It, kept coming up. That book started as one of those wacky Southern family memoirs that just seemed, well, wacky until about halfway through when the author wakes up to find himself being raped by his own father. The rest of the book, as you can imagine, was a brutal read.

Now, I would never presume to tell someone how to get over a trauma such as this. Whatever exorcisms they need to do to come out on the other side, I can hardly imagine having to carry that around. However, as a reader sounding the same notes over and over in book after book is a dicey proposition. Yes, you certainly can rewrite your life over and over in each new book (see Pat Conroy, Augustin Burroughs or Dave Pelzer) indeed you can make a whole career of it, but unless you're bringing new stuff to the party you're going to lose me.

And now? Now, I'm going to reread Sarah Plain and Tall about four times to get the taste for mail order bride stuff back.