Don't be fooled by the chaste title and conservative cover of this book! Set in a small Wisconsin town in the early 1900's, A Reliable Wife tells the story of Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman who places an advertisement for a wife in newspapers across the country: "Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical not romantic reasons ..."The woman he ends up choosing is Catherine Land - a woman who describes herself as "a simple, honest woman," though she is far from that. I don't want to give away too much, but her past is haunted by sex and lies that all tie in with her choosing to move to Wisconsin to become Ralph's wife. The crux of her plan in moving there was to slowly poison Ralph with arsenic and then to become a wealthy widow - she did not count on actually falling in love with him. But Ralph certainly harbors some twisted secrets of his own.
The plot keeps this book interesting, but the writing makes it amazing. Here is an excerpt from when Ralph is waiting for Catherine to arrive in Wisconsin at the train station:
Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life- every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him- everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.And here's an example of why I said this book is not as chaste and conservative as the title and cover may make it seem:
Her blood was water. Her eyes were blind. She was not Catherine. She was not anybody. Nobody knew where she was ... She stood in the kingdom of touch, and it was ecstasy to her. They made love as if someone were watching ... She was on his bed, her clothes in ruins on the floor, and he was naked too, she lying sideways on the bed, her bones gone, he moving above and on and at her, his tongue expertly bringing her to climax so fast and so deeply that she went on rolling with warmth and pleasure as he entered her and brought himself to coming, letting out a cry as he did so, his only sound. It was his own masculinity he was making love to, which drove him as he rode inside her, rapture at his own skill, his own pleasures, the tenderness, the savagery, ripping through her as though for the first time ...Yeah - I wasn't ready for all of that, either! I wish I could have seen my facial expressions as I was reading this book - Goolrick paints such a beautifully detailed picture of each and every scene. The only reason I'm not putting it on my top 10 list of fiction books is that many parts were too obviously written by a man. Some of the passionate scenes were beautiful, but Goolrick simply didn't capture them from a woman's perspective. If he was writing for men, then that's great - and I'd be interested to hear men's views of this book. But for me, there was only about an 80% connection. Nonetheless, if you're looking for a tasteful yet slightly edgy fiction book, this is it.
