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 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 ( )

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. ( )

A good read with interesting character development. about a young pregnant woman whose husband spends nearly 30 years in prison while she and her son go on with their lives. Good, but not among O'Nan's best. ( )

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 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
( )

Stewart O'Nan treats his characters with such compassion and tenderness that reading his work is often like reading spiritual literature. ( )