Upon reading the opening chapters of Robert Goolrick’s
debut novel, A RELIABLE WIFE, you might for a moment think that
you’ve read this one before. It’s 1907, and a wealthy
Wisconsin widower, Ralph Truitt, is waiting at the local train
station for his mail-order bride to arrive by rail from Chicago.
It’s the classic theme of historical romance novels, right?
Think again. What Goolrick has concocted here is a compelling and
deep novel that sheds a harsh light on the warped desires, passions
and obsessions of all its main characters.

You see, Ralph Truitt isn’t just some kindly old widower
looking for a second chance at love. He’s a jilted husband
who flew into a murderous rage after his wife left him, a
guilt-ridden old man who feels doomed to a life of frustration,
pain and brutal disappointments. He is surrounded by wealth and
beauty but can enjoy or appreciate none of it. He has picked out
the plainest, most reliable-looking woman out of the dozens who
applied to his newspaper advertisement, hoping that a
“normal” relationship with her might be his chance to
atone for past sins.

But the woman who emerges from the railway car is nothing like
her picture, or what Truitt was expecting or hoping for.
She’s beautiful, for one thing. And, as readers learn as they
witness Catherine Land’s transformation during her railway
journey, she’s neither innocent nor pure nor exactly
reliable. She’s a chameleon, a woman whose long and sordid
history has taught her how to change herself effortlessly to match
others’ whims: “She never stopped to wonder which self
was her true self and which one was false.” In this case,
Catherine has modeled herself to be the kind of wife she thinks
Truitt wants.

Not surprisingly, when two people’s inner lives and past
histories are so divorced from their outward appearance, Catherine
and Truitt’s courtship and marriage are neither
straightforward nor exactly romantic. But when Truitt asks
Catherine to help him track down and bring home his wayward son,
Antonio, from his first marriage, the depths of Catherine’s
deceptions and Truitt’s past wrongdoings become violently
clear.

Erotic, brutal and very, very dark, A RELIABLE WIFE is the kind
of Gothic novel that the Brontë sisters would have written had
there been no Victorian sanctions against writing frankly about
sex. There are madwomen, and men, aplenty here, all driven to
violence and despair thanks to desires thwarted or warped beyond
recognition. Both the smothering snow of northern Wisconsin and the
opulent debauchery of St. Louis (where Catherine goes to find
Antonio) seem to engender damaged people, in one place because
sexual desire is so suppressed, in the other because it is too
freely given. Throughout the book, Goolrick gives readers brief
glimpses into other, anonymous lives destroyed, even as he fully
spins out the seemingly fatalistic narrative of Catherine and
Truitt’s relationship to its surprising conclusion, giving
the impression that their tragic, twisted story is just one of
countless tales just like it.

Relentless and almost compulsively absorbing, A RELIABLE WIFE
will send chills down your spine even under the warmest eiderdown
comforter.