Set in 1907 Wisconsin, Goolrick's fiction debut (after a memoir, The End of the World as We Know It) gets off to a slow, stylized start, but eventually generates some real suspense. When Catherine Land, who's survived a traumatic early life by using her wits and sexuality as weapons, happens on a newspaper ad from a well-to-do businessman in need of a "reliable wife," she invents a plan to benefit from his riches and his need. Her new husband, Ralph Truitt, discovers she's deceived him the moment she arrives in his remote hometown. Driven by a complex mix of emotions and simple animal attraction, he marries her anyway. After the wedding, Catherine helps Ralph search for his estranged son and, despite growing misgivings, begins to poison him with small doses of arsenic. Ralph sickens but doesn't die, and their story unfolds in ways neither they nor the reader expect. This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Don't be fooled by the prissy cover or that ironic title. Robert Goolrick's first novel, "A Reliable Wife," isn't just hot, it's in heat: a gothic tale of such smoldering desire it should be read in a cold shower. This is a bodice ripper of a hundred thousand pearly buttons, ripped off one at a time with agonizing restraint. It works only because Goolrick never cracks a smile, never lets on that he thinks all this overwrought sexual frustration is anything but the most serious incantation of longing and despair ever uttered in the dead of night. The curtain rises in 1907 during a Wisconsin winter "cold enough to sear the skin from your bones." Ralph Truitt, the wealthiest man in town, stands frozen in place on a train platform, but inside he's burning with the unsated desire of 20 solitary years. Ralph is waiting for his mail-order bride, a woman he requisitioned through a classified ad: "Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical not romantic reasons. . . . Discreet." That may sound as horny as Sunday school, but Ralph isn't entirely what he seems, standing there on the platform with "his eyes turned downward, engraved with a permanent air of condescension and grief." Inside, the 58-year-old widower is startled by the intensity of his desires, consumed with thoughts of sex and murder and madness in homes all around town. "Sometimes his loneliness was like a fire beneath his skin," Goolrick writes. "He had thought of taking his razor and slicing his own flesh, peeling back the skin that would not stop burning." This first chapter, in which everything appears stock still, is told in a husky whisper of something lurid and painful, "the terrible whip of tragedy." Again and again, we hear this refrain, like a judgment and a curse: "These things happened." Keep this in mind as you're scanning the personal ads in the City Paper. When Catherine Land finally arrives, looking prim and dour, she isn't what she appears to be, either. She threw her extravagant party dresses out the train window a few miles from town, and she has hidden jewels in the hem of her black wool dress. She's not even the woman in the photo she sent Ralph during their summer of tentative correspondence. And she's carrying a bottle of arsenic and "a long and complicated scheme." Poor Ralph has some awfully bad luck with women: the matrimonial equivalent of sailing to Europe on the Titanic and flying home on the Hindenburg. "This begins in a lie," he tells Catherine sternly as he picks up her bags. "I want you to know that I know that. . . . Whatever else, you're a liar." All Ralph wants -- or pretends he wants -- is "a simple, honest woman. A quiet life. A life in which everything could be saved and nobody went insane." That's so hard to attain when your new bride hopes to poison you straightaway. But damned if he doesn't almost die in a spectacular riding accident while bringing her home from the station. Poor Catherine finds she's got to nurse Ralph back to health before she can start killing him. Don't worry: I'm not giving anything away. Neither of these two steely people is playing straight with the other, and Goolrick isn't playing straight with us, either. The floor collapses in almost every chapter, and we suddenly crash through assumptions we'd thought were solid. Goolrick keeps probing at the way people force themselves not to know something -- not to believe the truth -- in order to fulfill their deepest longings. The novel is deliciously wicked and tense, presented as a series of sepia tableaux, interrupted by flashes of bright red violence. The whole thing takes place in a fever pitch of exquisite sensations and boundless grief in a place where "the winters were long, and tragedy and madness rose in the pristine air." The word "alone" spreads through these pages like mold in the cellar, until it's everywhere. The stillness and whiteness of the Wisconsin setting eventually give way to the lush depravity of St. Louis, lined with music halls and opium dens. Much of this section takes place in "a tented, brocaded bedroom, like a palace abandoned before a revolution." I'm reluctant to quote much more for fear of making the book sound silly -- "Love that lived beyond passion was ephemeral. It was the gauze bandage that wrapped the wounds of your heart" -- but once you've fallen into the miasma of "A Reliable Wife," it's intoxicating. (Columbia Pictures has already grabbed the rights for what could be an inflammable movie.) I'm reminded of Edgar Allan Poe's stories with their claustrophobic atmosphere, hyper-maudlin tone and the extravagant suffering that borders on garishness. (Yes, Goolrick includes a forlorn castle, too.) These are all qualities the author displayed in his equally gothic memoir, "The End of the World as We Know It" (2007). But his inspiration for "A Reliable Wife" reportedly came from "Wisconsin Death Trip," a grim collection of antique photographs published in 1973. The editor of that book, Michael Lesy, reproduced pictures of children laid to rest and parents in shock, along with newspaper anecdotes about murder, illness, assault and insanity -- the same kinds of ghastly tales that obsess Goolrick's overheating characters. Ultimately, this bizarre story is one of forgiveness. But the path to that salutary conclusion lies through a spectacularly orchestrated crescendo of violation and violence, a chapter you finish feeling surprised that everyone around you hasn't heard the screams, too.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel - Jeannette Walls
For the first 10 years of her life, Lily Casey Smith, the narrator of this true-life novel by her granddaughter, Walls, lived in a dirt dugout in west Texas. Walls, whose megaselling memoir, The Glass Castle, recalled her own upbringing, writes in what she recalls as Lily's plainspoken voice, whose recital provides plenty of drama and suspense as she ricochets from one challenge to another. Having been educated in fits and starts because of her parents' penury, Lily becomes a teacher at age 15 in a remote frontier town she reaches after a solo 28-day ride. Marriage to a bigamist almost saps her spirit, but later she weds a rancher with whom she shares two children and a strain of plucky resilience. (They sell bootleg liquor during Prohibition, hiding the bottles under a baby's crib.) Lily is a spirited heroine, fiercely outspoken against hypocrisy and prejudice, a rodeo rider and fearless breaker of horses, and a ruthless poker player. Assailed by flash floods, tornados and droughts, Lily never gets far from hardscrabble drudgery in several states—New Mexico, Arizona, Illinois—but hers is one of those heartwarming stories about indomitable women that will always find an audience.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marie Arana It's a rare family memoir that packs all the power of a Charles Dickens novel. The adults must be as cruel as they are foolish, the children as resourceful as they are wise. Yet the characters in Jeannette Walls's best-selling 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," possessed all those Dickensian qualities. Walls's father, Rex, was a con man and an alcoholic; her mother, Rose Mary, unhinged and immature; together they made for disastrous parents, and the misery they inflicted was dire. So it's no surprise that the story of this coal-town family, in all its glorious dysfunction, sold 2.5 million copies. Overseas, it was read in 25 languages. The readers who got to know Rex and Rose Mary were legion, and they closed "The Glass Castle" wanting to know more. But the sequel that Walls now offers is not a memoir at all. Written from the point of view of her gritty West Texan grandmother, "Half Broke Horses" is described as a "True-Life Novel," and the story it tells takes place not within the author's lifetime, but half a century before she was born. The heroine and narrator is Lily Casey Smith, the spunky daughter of an ex-convict and a pious, God-fearing mother. Born in 1901 in a dugout, "more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank," Lily grows up with a floor that runs to mud during the rainy season and a ceiling that drops the occasional snake or scorpion. Her father believes in a Theory of Purpose; her mother believes in the power of prayer. In truth, they agree on very little, aside from the principle that bathrooms inside houses are downright disgusting. By 5, Lily is learning to train her father's horses. At 6, she's in charge of breaking them in. A veteran of ill winds and droughts, she learns to love that hard, yellow land, even though the land doesn't appear to love her much in return. When a tornado smashes a windmill into the family abode, her father wails, "If I owned hell and west Texas, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell." But Lily is an indomitable young woman. By 12, she is running the ranch, mucking out the barns, helping to geld the horses, giving the ranch hands all the orders. At 15, she proves so headstrong that she heads out on horseback to make a new life as an itinerant teacher, 500 miles away on the Arizona frontier. As it turns out, everywhere she goes Lily strikes people as being bullheaded. When she is fired from one too many schoolrooms, she heads for Chicago just as World War I comes to a close, but in the flood of returning soldiers, she's unable to find a job. She works as a housemaid for rich people she finds unintelligent, ends up irritating them, floats around the big city with a new friend she will lose, and ends up marrying a traveling salesman. But actually the "crumb-bun" isn't traveling at all, only living across town with another wife and children. So it goes. Lily runs up against hardships and survives them, steeling her resolve to be true to herself and speak her mind. Homesick for the West, she returns to Arizona and becomes known as "the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County." Along the way she meets a lapsed Mormon, makes it clear she won't put up with any funny polygamy business, then asks for his hand in marriage. With Jim Smith at her side, Lily will go on to run liquor during the Prohibition, earn a college degree, learn to fly an airplane, survive the Great Depression and run a 100,000-acre ranch just north of the Juniper Mountains. Most important, she will give birth to the wild, irrepressible Rosemary, who, in turn, will grow up to marry the adorable rake Rex and give birth to four more indomitable children who will face their own travails in the coal hills of West Virginia. Off they will go like a herd of half-broke horses unfit for corral or the open range. Let me take a cue from Lily Casey Smith and speak plainly here: This book is no "Glass Castle." Beyond what we already know about the lives of Rex and Rosemary when we start these pages, there is little sparkle or narrative drive. Too often the prose is flat and unimaginative. There's no one to love, certainly not Lily. And not until Rex appears on Page 248 (a handful of pages before the end), does the dialogue pick up, the author's voice kick into a nice trot and the prose shine. "Half Broke Horses" may be a commendable chronicle of an admirably tough woman on America's western frontier, but a well-crafted work of fiction it is not, and it cannot compare to classic "true-life novels" like Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" or Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." For a great many readers of this book, it probably won't matter. It will be enough to come upon a few sentences such as these and understand how Rosemary learned to tolerate her own slovenliness: "Levi's we didn't wash at all. . . . We wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil -- and then we wore them some more. . . . When [they] reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn't pay a cowboy to let you wash his." It's useful information if you're curious about Jeannette Walls's mother. But the novel itself is too tied to "The Glass Castle" to function well on its own. Every page, every chapter, seems to work only as a prolegomenon to the memoir. That's no way to read a work of fiction. As Rex says to Lily in the last pages of this book, "The problem with being attached to an anchor is it's damned hard to fly."
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Marie Arana It's a rare family memoir that packs all the power of a Charles Dickens novel. The adults must be as cruel as they are foolish, the children as resourceful as they are wise. Yet the characters in Jeannette Walls's best-selling 2005 memoir, "The Glass Castle," possessed all those Dickensian qualities. Walls's father, Rex, was a con man and an alcoholic; her mother, Rose Mary, unhinged and immature; together they made for disastrous parents, and the misery they inflicted was dire. So it's no surprise that the story of this coal-town family, in all its glorious dysfunction, sold 2.5 million copies. Overseas, it was read in 25 languages. The readers who got to know Rex and Rose Mary were legion, and they closed "The Glass Castle" wanting to know more. But the sequel that Walls now offers is not a memoir at all. Written from the point of view of her gritty West Texan grandmother, "Half Broke Horses" is described as a "True-Life Novel," and the story it tells takes place not within the author's lifetime, but half a century before she was born. The heroine and narrator is Lily Casey Smith, the spunky daughter of an ex-convict and a pious, God-fearing mother. Born in 1901 in a dugout, "more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank," Lily grows up with a floor that runs to mud during the rainy season and a ceiling that drops the occasional snake or scorpion. Her father believes in a Theory of Purpose; her mother believes in the power of prayer. In truth, they agree on very little, aside from the principle that bathrooms inside houses are downright disgusting. By 5, Lily is learning to train her father's horses. At 6, she's in charge of breaking them in. A veteran of ill winds and droughts, she learns to love that hard, yellow land, even though the land doesn't appear to love her much in return. When a tornado smashes a windmill into the family abode, her father wails, "If I owned hell and west Texas, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell." But Lily is an indomitable young woman. By 12, she is running the ranch, mucking out the barns, helping to geld the horses, giving the ranch hands all the orders. At 15, she proves so headstrong that she heads out on horseback to make a new life as an itinerant teacher, 500 miles away on the Arizona frontier. As it turns out, everywhere she goes Lily strikes people as being bullheaded. When she is fired from one too many schoolrooms, she heads for Chicago just as World War I comes to a close, but in the flood of returning soldiers, she's unable to find a job. She works as a housemaid for rich people she finds unintelligent, ends up irritating them, floats around the big city with a new friend she will lose, and ends up marrying a traveling salesman. But actually the "crumb-bun" isn't traveling at all, only living across town with another wife and children. So it goes. Lily runs up against hardships and survives them, steeling her resolve to be true to herself and speak her mind. Homesick for the West, she returns to Arizona and becomes known as "the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County." Along the way she meets a lapsed Mormon, makes it clear she won't put up with any funny polygamy business, then asks for his hand in marriage. With Jim Smith at her side, Lily will go on to run liquor during the Prohibition, earn a college degree, learn to fly an airplane, survive the Great Depression and run a 100,000-acre ranch just north of the Juniper Mountains. Most important, she will give birth to the wild, irrepressible Rosemary, who, in turn, will grow up to marry the adorable rake Rex and give birth to four more indomitable children who will face their own travails in the coal hills of West Virginia. Off they will go like a herd of half-broke horses unfit for corral or the open range. Let me take a cue from Lily Casey Smith and speak plainly here: This book is no "Glass Castle." Beyond what we already know about the lives of Rex and Rosemary when we start these pages, there is little sparkle or narrative drive. Too often the prose is flat and unimaginative. There's no one to love, certainly not Lily. And not until Rex appears on Page 248 (a handful of pages before the end), does the dialogue pick up, the author's voice kick into a nice trot and the prose shine. "Half Broke Horses" may be a commendable chronicle of an admirably tough woman on America's western frontier, but a well-crafted work of fiction it is not, and it cannot compare to classic "true-life novels" like Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" or Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." For a great many readers of this book, it probably won't matter. It will be enough to come upon a few sentences such as these and understand how Rosemary learned to tolerate her own slovenliness: "Levi's we didn't wash at all. . . . We wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil -- and then we wore them some more. . . . When [they] reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn't pay a cowboy to let you wash his." It's useful information if you're curious about Jeannette Walls's mother. But the novel itself is too tied to "The Glass Castle" to function well on its own. Every page, every chapter, seems to work only as a prolegomenon to the memoir. That's no way to read a work of fiction. As Rex says to Lily in the last pages of this book, "The problem with being attached to an anchor is it's damned hard to fly."
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
1984 - George Orwell
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 as a warning about the menaces of totalitarianism. The novel is set in an imaginary future world that is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity. Orwell's warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern political abuses. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 as a warning about the menaces of totalitarianism. The novel is set in an imaginary future world that is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity. Orwell's warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern political abuses. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer -- risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer -- risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
The Seamstress - Sara Tuvel Bernstein
A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania between the wars and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. Ashamed to return home after her expulsion, she looked for work in Bucharest and discovered a talent for dressmaking. That talent--and her blond hair, blue eyes, and overall Gentile appearance--allowed her entry into the highest reaches of Romanian society, albeit as a dressmaker. Bernstein recounts the growing shadow of the native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, a rising tide of anti-Semitic laws, and finally, the open persecution of Romania's Jews. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbrck, a women's concentration camp deep in Germany. Nineteen out of every twenty women transported there died. The author, her sister Esther, and two other friends banded together and, largely due to Sara's extraordinary street smarts and intuition, managed to survive. Although Bernstein was not a professional writer, she tells this story with style and power. Her daughter Marlene contributes a moving epilogue to close out Sara's life. One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"There are many recent accounts of Holocaust victims, but this work stands alone as a testimony to personal strength and an independent spirit." -Library Journal
"Extraordinary." -Booklist
"An engrossing history lesson as well as an important archive." -Faye Kellerman
"Well-told...deserves a prominent place in the archive of Holocaust survival stories." -Publishers Weekly
"One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs" (Kirkus Reviews)
"There are many recent accounts of Holocaust victims, but this work stands alone as a testimony to personal strength and an independent spirit." -Library Journal
"Extraordinary." -Booklist
"An engrossing history lesson as well as an important archive." -Faye Kellerman
"Well-told...deserves a prominent place in the archive of Holocaust survival stories." -Publishers Weekly
"One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs" (Kirkus Reviews)
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