My new favorite book: A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

My new favorite book is a book I read for my book club, A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. The edition I read is the special book club edition and has book club discussion questions and an interview with Goolrick. I found the interview with Goolrick fascinating. He said that Ralph and his mail-order bride are both based, in different ways (obviously?) on him and I would guess that that hint of autobiography in the action and characterization is part of what gives this book its power, and well as Goolrick's mastery of structure, action, and style.

I like this book because I feel that there's a lot of rich psychological insight, both in what the characters say and how they see their world. Something that Ralph says was also identical to something my father said once; I also feel that it's more true to the nineteenth century than some other historical fiction I've read lately (although perhaps not very) and it's brilliantly plotted. The action is compelling, and it moves fast. It's almost true that to say that I did not put the book down once I started it: I read the book in one evening.

The bare skeleton of the plot is that a wealthy man in nineteenth century Wisconsin advertises for a wife. I suspect there are quite a few books that have that basis plot outline. Goolrick does so much with this. I don't want to spoil the ending for you in case you haven't read it but I'll say that the plot offers some twists that I didn't anticipate, and offers characters that are passionate, desperate, self-contradictory, capable of change and incapable of change, in a narrative that is full of drama -- that doesn't seem contrived.

It is an ideal book to be made into a movie and I read that the rights had been sold to Columbia Pictures. For those of you who have read the book, who do you think should play the leads? One writer suggested Bette Davis and Claude Rains and that should give you some indication as to the incendiary nature of this novel.