A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

          I choose to read this novel because it was set in the winter of 1907 in northern Wisconsin, a climate similar to Michigan.  I also consider myself a “reliable wife” and was interested to see the similarities between myself and another woman who would have been my peer one hundred years ago.  But I was mistaken about the plot of this novel.  Catherine Land turned out to be a fairly “unreliable” wife and quite dishonest, but I still read this 320 page novel in less than a day, so it definitely kept my interest.

            The book is written in three parts.  Part one begins with the extremely wealthy middle aged (widowed and children less) Ralph Truitt.  He feels judged by the entire town, but the author doesn’t tell us why Ralph is so self-conscious in the beginning. In chapter two, we learn that Ralph has placed a classified ad seeking a wife.  It is Catherine Land who has committed to marrying Ralph, a man she has not met, who lives in the rough terrain of northern Wisconsin, a climate she has never experienced coming from St. Louis.  But the happy couple doesn’t hit it off.  Catherine gets off the train, gets into Ralph’s carriage, and halfway to his home the horses get spooked by a deer and go crazy.  Ralph is thrown from the carriage and nearly killed.  Catherine is forced to learn her new role as wife in a strange place while her husband is unconscious.  She explores his beautiful home and chats with his servants, but meanwhile she treasures a small vile of poison that she keeps hidden in her room.  It is implied that she will be poisoning her husband.  If she wanted him dead though, why did she volunteer to sew up his head?  What was the purpose of answering his ad if she just wanted out of the relationship from the start?  Well, he is wealthy.

            In part two, it becomes clear that Catherine is not the pure “missionary’s daughter” that she claimed to be.  She actually experienced quite the opposite.  And she had a lover back in St. Louis whom she promised to come back to—with money!  I don’t think I can any further in this book review without being a spoiler.  You’ll have to read it yourself to see how it plays out between Ralph and Catherine.

            A note about author’s craft: I find Robert Goolrick to have a wonderful vocabulary, include beautiful similes, and very detailed imagery.  But I had a major problem with nearly every single page in the novel.  Hardly ever would Goolrick start a sentence with anything but a pronoun.  So if he was talking about Ralph, fifteen sentences in a row would start with “HE”.  If he was narrating about Catherine, nearly every sentence on the page would start with “SHE”.  As a writing teacher I was dying inside, screaming “Vary your sentence beginnings!” As a “sentence stalker” I am always on the lookout for sentences that I can use as models in the classroom, for example, sentences containing participles.  I did not gain many sentences to use as models from this novel, but I did thoroughly enjoy the plot and all of its twists.