The Good Wife: A Novel

O'Nan is a favorite author of mine, and he didn't disappoint with this one. When the book opens, it is the mid-1970s. Patty Dickerson is pregnant, laying in bed waiting for her husband Tommy to get home from his hockey game. Unbeknownst to her, Tommy and a friend have been robbing homes and selling the stolen items for extra cash. They plan to break into a home owned by an elderly woman who is supposed to be out for the evening. Unfortunately for all involved, she is home, and things spiral out of control, and the woman is killed. Excellent storytelling of the trial and Patty and Tommy's life in the aftermath of the trial. Interesting look at how quickly a good life can go bad and how the people involved react to the changes. This show more reader was left wondering how many of us would be as loyal as Patty was to Tommy and if she made the right decision. Excellent book and highly recommended. show less

Patty is asleep as the book begins. Asleep and pregnant. Her husband is still out, he was playing a ball game with his friends and went to celebrate his first goal of the season. He will be home soon.

Or so she thinks.

Instead, Tommy won't be home for a long time to come. He and a friend broke into someone's house to steal some valuable guns and in the end, an old lady is dead and Tommy is in jail. No, I'm not giving the plot away -- all of this happens on the first few pages and that's basically it as far as "action" is concerned.

The rest of the book consists of waiting. Patty's waiting -- for the trial, for the appeal, for a call, for the next visit, for the parole hearings, for Tommy to be released. Months of waiting, years of waiting, show more decades. Waiting and coping. Coping with her husband being away, with raising her son without him, with frustrating jobs, with loneliness, with too little money, with the endless drives to correctional facilities, with getting older.

At the beginning I thought: Cut your losses, girl. Don't pay the bill for someone else's horrible mistake, you only have this one life. But Patty loves Tommy and she wants to spend her life with him. And what would I do myself in a comparable situation? Of course, my husband would not break into someone's house. But neither did Patty think that Tommy would... show less

This is the second work of Stewart O’Nan’s I’ve read. The first (about a decade ago) was The Circus Fire, which I never reviewed, but which I still remember as having been quite competently written.


In The Good Wife, we find at least two extraordinary things: (1) the ordinariness of the characters, their situations, their actions and reactions, what they buy, use, abuse and ultimately destroy or discard, right down to the all-too-familiar brand names; and (2) O’Nan’s extraordinary powers of description, with which he lifts these characters right up and off the page—and consequently turns ‘ordinary’ into ‘extraordinary.’


It’s refreshing to read a writer who doesn’t have to resort to any magical anything to tell a show more good story. He simply tells it: plainly; directly; with extraordinary detail. Stewart O’Nan has a way of making the mundane sound monumental, consequently memorable. You may well call it ‘minimalism’—but if so, it’s a minimalism that doesn’t sound in the least contrived. In fact, If MFA programs use such a thing as a “style manual,” this book should be part of it. At the very least, it should be part of a program for high school students of creative writing whose all-too-frequent complaint is “But I have nothing to write about!”


If I have any criticism of this work at all — and the reason I’m now giving it only four stars — it’s that the narrative is too often too colloquial for my tastes. Colloquial is fine in dialogue … and fine, too, if the story is being told through a mouthpiece character with far less education than Stewart O’Nan has. But I think a competent writer should hold the grammatical line on narrative. If not, he or she gives the wrong message to aspiring writers — not to mention to readers of English as a second language.


That said, and as with any virtuosic piece of art, I even learned a couple of new things — simple, ordinary in scope, but useful. The first? Bag balm: it’s what we all (in northern climes) need for dry skin in winter before fingers and lips begin to crack and bleed. I checked. It’s been around since 1899, but known almost exclusively to Vermont farmers — and subsequently, to their wives. From cows’ udders to farmers’ hands into the minds of good farmers’ wives—and on down to us via the local drug store. Bag balm: it’s not just for mule skinners.


The second? Sand tarts, which were originally called sandbakelse – an import from Norway as far back as 1845. God knows I’ve seen (and eaten) them often enough; I’ve just never known what they were called.


Most of The Good Wife hangs its weary head under the yoke of waiting, waiting, waiting. I won’t say what the female protagonist is waiting for specifically because that would reveal too much about the story. But we all know what it’s like to wait, and Mr. O’Nan does a masterful job in re-creating the sorry sense of it. It’s a tribute to his prose that he can string together myriad non- (or, at best, trivial) events without boring the reader. And yet it’s not hard for me, as a resident of bustling Brooklyn, to understand why so many kids from small-town America choose to abandon those small towns at the first opportunity and either drown themselves in drugs and alcohol, or move to the big city.


Oh, and poverty. Did I mention poverty? It goes hand in hand with waiting. And Mr. O’Nan does an admirable job as Best Man to the inevitable wedding of both.


A fair amount of the story is also devoted to the (almost) inevitable alienation that occurs between a father and his son, even if the son’s scholastic achievement is a little difficult to fathom. In any case, I can’t reveal the reason(s) for that alienation without giving away too much of the plot.


This is overall an excellent read for someone in similar circumstances — or under any circumstances in which waiting is the name of the game — and I highly recommend it. I just as highly recommend it to aspiring and emerging writers as a model. Granta had it right when it named him, in 1996, one of America’s Best Young Novelists.


RRB
08/28/14
Brooklyn, NY show less

A very good book but exactly the wrong thing to read on a sunny beach in Croatia. I should have known better. Already on the cover it says that the story is about a woman waiting 28 years for her husband to get out of jail from his life sentence. Like other books by Stewart O'Nan nothing much happens. It's a story of a family coping with the situation. The book mostly covers the trial and following 28 years. It was a very good book but the endless waiting, waiting and waiting dragged me down, despite knowing what would eventually happen.
What surprised me was that despite of what Tommy does, her anger isn't a topic of the book. It's only hinted at very briefly early on and then doesn't come up again. She gave up so much for him in these show more 28 years while he is in jail yet she never really uses it against him. She sees him as a victim, despite him clearly having responsibility for what happened. It's something I have a very hard time relating to. show less

Not easy to rate this one. Top notch writing from O'Nan again but I couldn't seem to drum up any sort of empathy for the main characters no matter how hard I tried. Patty's refusal to accept her husband as anything other than a good guy was maddening. Tommy's lack of remorse or any kind of acknowledgement for his actions, repugnant. At times I was hoping their lives would get easier but I never really cared if he got out of prison.

I hated it.

What I hated about it is how much the wife blames EVERY.ONE.ELSE! for her husband MURDERING SOMEONE and doesn't blame him at all. He's the victim in all this. And then her son, WHO IS BORN WHILE HER HUSBAND IS IN JAIL, is another person who just becomes another person who persecutes her victim husband. The wife is either blind by love or a freakin' idiot -- and also, probably a racist. The book sucked.

The first few chapters, after the murder, the wife is, like, "I don't know when he started lying to me! Now I know where all this mysterious money was coming from." And yet she FULLY believes him when he says he didn't kill the old lady and everyone else is lying. She blames the "best friend" that turned state evidence for show more turning because, had he just kept his mouth shut, both of them could have gotten off but instead her husband got charged with the murder.

I can't even begin to understand her mind set through the whole book. I kept hoping she was going to ditch his ass and, nope, instead she keeps blaming everyone else for their problems. The prison system is just so mean! YOUR HUSBAND MURDERED AN OLD WOMAN!!

So, yeah, hated the book.
Adrianne show less

I really felt for the the main character, Patty, as she struggles years of being a single mom following her husband's incarceration. I guess I expected the narrative to go somewhere, however. I caught myself checking to see how many pages remained in the book and wondering if there was enough space for the surprise or dramatic plot twist that never occurred. Years go by in Patty's life, sometimes in the span of one page, where nothing major happens. Perhaps the reader is expected to simply endure, like Patty must, but it doesn't make for especially good reading.