Don't ask me what else I did the summer I read Hardy. I must have had a job, kept house. I vaguely recall a vegetable garden, though my husband, I suspect, was the one who tended it. Mostly I remember sitting in the backyard every evening with a book in my lap. Come nightfall, my husband would light the Coleman lantern so that I wouldn't have to move out of my lawn chair. I was that spellbound.
Robert Goolrick's debut novel has the same effect. "A Reliable Wife" is as engrossing as it is unexpected: a neo-Gothic romance set in rural Wisconsin in the winter of 1907. Lush, erotic, incantatory, with darkly passionate characters and a twisted and suspenseful plot, the book has the visionary quality of an opium dream. To open it is to enter another world. And in this world, nothing is as it seems.
The story opens with a man standing on a platform waiting for the train that will deliver the woman he is to marry. The train is late. A blizzard is approaching. The man is anxious; he keeps checking his silver watch. He has never met the woman. He holds in his pocket her letter answering his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife."
The man, 54-year-old Ralph Truitt, is to all appearances a cold, reserved businessman, the type no one dares call by his first name. He has at one time or other employed almost everyone in Truitt, Wis., "in the iron foundry, logging or mining or buying and selling and tallying up the sales or the rents." A widower with "ashen" skin and "lifeless" hair, he believes that his face and body are "unreadable." But Ralph has a scandalous history and a secret obsession. He imagines "sex in every bed. He walked the streets of his town every day, seeing on every face the simple charities they had afforded one another in the dark. ... [He] was haunted by the sexual act, the sexual lives, which lay hidden and vast beneath their clothes."
For her part, the woman on the train, Catherine Land, is nothing like the "simple, honest woman" described in her letters to Ralph. She is complex and calculating, inscrutable, motivated by "love and money," of which she has had little in her 34 years. She is traveling from Chicago to the wilds of Wisconsin with a plan: She will marry Ralph, slowly poison him and inherit his fortune so that she can marry her "useless and beautiful lover" and "live a life of extraordinary delight."
Ralph suspects nothing, nor is Catherine aware that Ralph has his own plan for her. (His terse marriage offer states only that it is "compelled by practical, not romantic reasons.") They wed, each intending to use the other to fulfill a private fantasy, neither imagining how their fantasies are entangled.
Their story plays out in a setting as deceptive as the characters themselves. From the window of Ralph's house Catherine sees snow, "eternal, infinite. Across the yard, across the roof of the barn, down to the smooth round pond at the foot of the farthest field, there was not a footprint, not a mark in the entire landscape, only the silvered and impenetrable sweep of snow. Perfection." For all the pristine beauty of the landscape, however, the country is a savage place. Every night at the dinner table, Ralph reads newspaper accounts of suicides, poisonings, diseases that claim whole families of children. "In the country, there was insanity. There were fires and burnings and murders and rapes, unthinkable cruelties, usually committed by people against the people they knew."
To paint this stark backdrop, the author drew from Michael Lesy's 1973 cult classic, "Wisconsin Death Trip." Lesy's book is a collection of late 19th-century photographs and news accounts that depict a rural Midwest plagued by crime, cruelty, disease and madness. According to Lesy, "in a time that was disjointed by a depression as epidemically fatal and grotesque as the most contagious disease, these articles ... permitted desperate people to be solaced by others' despair. [They] turned grief inside out."
Goolrick, likewise, turns the grief of his characters inside out, offering a nuanced and disturbing study of tortured souls who find a kind of solace in their mutual despair.
The writing is beautifully modulated. Its occasional excesses (the most startling is a description of Ralph's intense desire for Catherine: "He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body.") seem purposeful, a conscious invocation of the Gothic romances to which this book will inevitably be compared.
With "A Reliable Wife," Goolrick gives surprising new life to an old form. This is a literary page-turner in which, for all the mystery and brilliance of its plot, the real drama takes place in the hearts of the characters. This is a novel to make you remember why you love novels.
Kim Church is a Raleigh novelist and short story writer. Her work is included in the new anthology, "The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus."
