A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

I haven’t read a book this bad in a long time. I’m surprised I even finished it, except that I wanted to be able to write a coherent post. This book features unpleasant characters, improbable plot devices, unexplained personality changes, off-putting sex, a bit of gruesome violence, and a complete lack of subtlety or nuance – it’s a total mess. There is one clever plot twist, I’ll grant that, though maybe more astute readers would have seen it coming. I probably was too irritated by that time to recognize the signs.

And can I mention the prose style? The overwrought, melodramatic and repetitive prose, the one-sentence paragraphs (“And so he wept.”), the declarative subject-verb-object construction over and over and over again until I thought I would scream? There, I mentioned it.

Here is a paragraph I that flagged because it was so impossibly bad. I leave you with it.

…There was not a speck of dust in the room. It was a fine room, not the best, but fine. It was the sort of room in which she might have served coffee or tea, dressed for dinner or the theater, might have kept a canary, if she had lived there, but she didn’t live there and no bird sang.

(Book 40, 2010)