I whipped through Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife (2009) today, eager to get to the "satisfying close" that the Publisher's Weekly review promised. I was not satisfied. Here's what PW said:
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.
The book was so slow to start I was within one page of tossing it aside. Then, on page 33, POW! Well, I thought, this isn't going to be so bad after all. But soon I was bogged down again. I finished the book by skimming through most of the last 100 pages looking for those plot developments that the characters didn't expect. There were some pretty dramatic ones, but they are overgrown with verbiage. The book verges on pornography, in my opinion, which I found unnecessary and annoying.
I've been having trouble getting into the groove with many of the books I've tried to read lately, but I think this souped-up romance novel with overtones of psychological drama will be too much for many readers.