The Good Wife Book

There is a very small list of professions dramatized in modern novels, television shows, and movies. Drama requires that a protagonist be able to engage in the action at any time; as such, he or she can't be helping someone fill out a loan application while there's an international conspiracy to unravel. The most popular fictional jobs belong to doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement officials, since a story's drama can arise organically from the job. Outside of that realm, fictional professions tend to get a bit vague, leading to characters who are "investors" or "writers," which implies a stable income without the necessity of being in an office from nine-to-five.

A big exception to this rule is Stewart O'Nan. The people who populate his novels are distinctly working class, with distinctly working-class jobs. They are not high-priced attorneys in three-piece suits, or brilliant physicians with god complexes; rather, they work as short-order cooks, in factories, or out on highway crews. O'Nan's willingness to venture from the glossy worlds of the upwardly mobile has earned him a reputation as something of a balladeer of blue collar America.

This is true, to an extent. O'Nan has an exceptionally keen eye for the commonplace, the everyday details that are familiar to most of us who aren't out solving murders or separating Siamese twins in a stalled elevator with only a paper clip and some pasta salad. His characters have stunted ambitions, work dreary jobs for low pay, struggle with balky automobiles and try to escape from mounting debt.

Sounds entertaining, right?

Of course, if that's all his books were about, there wouldn't be much point in reading them. If I wanted to read about a crappy job, broke-down cars, and everlasting debt, I don't need to open a novel. I'd just read my own blog.

Instead, O'Nan has a tendency to use a genre hook to reel you in, to get you to pick the book off a crowded shelf and start reading. This hook might be something like a missing girl, or a shooting, or a man going to prison. Whereas most novels would make that hook the locus of the drama, O'Nan attacks the subject from an oblique angle. He uses the extraordinary as a means to explore the ordinary.

In The Good Wife (not to be confused with anything having to do with Juliana Margulies or Chris Noth), a man named Tommy Dickerson is convicted of murder and sent to prison for 28 years. (This information comes from the back cover, so I don't count it as a spoiler. Of course, if you're reading this book without a cover, it might be. But you're not supposed to do that). There's a lot of directions an author can go with a premise like that. You can make the story about the killing; you can make it a whodunit; you can craft a courtroom drama; or you can tell a prison tale that ends with a painstakingly excavated tunnel and a joyous reunion in Zihuatanejo.

O'Nan chooses an entirely different tact. His main character is Tommy's wife, Patty, who is pregnant when the story begins, on the night of the crime that will forever change her life. The early parts of the story, which are the most detailed, concern Patty's reaction to Tommy's arrest, her attempts to get him a lawyer, and her experience sitting through the trial.

Once the conviction has been handed down, and Tommy sent packing to the penitentiary, the novel starts to take larger temporal leaps. Years go by, marked by successive Thanksgivings and Christmases (The Good Wife takes place in New York State, and begins in the 70s, with the Vikings and Steelers in Super Bowl IX. O'Nan referenced this same game in Snow Angels. As a Vikings fan, I find this hurtful). We follow Patty's struggles as she has to move out of her home and in with family; raise a child; find a job; and make the long drive to visit Tommy in the clink.

The story is told entirely from Patty's point of view. There isn't a scene in the novel where Patty is not present (which leads to some moments where, as an attorney, I was shaking my head; I seriously doubt that any defense attorney would be plotting strategy with his client's wife or, shockingly, leaving important tactical decisions up to her). This means that a lot of the tropes you might expect from a prison-themed novel are not present. There are no prison riots, no shower rapes, no escape plots. The only parts of the prison we see are the parts Patty sees: the outer walls and razor wire; the visiting room. The only things we hear about prison are the things Tommy decides to tell her.

This confined point-of-view means that supporting characters tend to recede into the background. What we learn of them we learn in snatches of dialogue; what we know of them is limited by what Patty knows. O'Nan's narrative elisions can be frustrating to readers acclimated to the typical doling of information found in most books. He will mention things you think will become important later, but are never brought up again. It's as though he is trying to see how often he can flaunt the dictum of Chekov's Gun.

For instance, O'Nan drops several hints of a complicated familial history with regards to Patty's late father and the estranged relationship between two of her sisters (Shannon and Eileen). One could reasonably expect these seeds, dutifully planted by the author, to bear some fruit. They do not. Rather, like a drunk burnt-out Johnny Appleseed, O'Nan tosses dramatic seedlings into the winds, without a second thought as to whether they fall onto fertile soil or an asphalt road.

From the few O'Nan novels I've read, I've come to expect and accept this. In a way, I've come to enjoy it. Life is not a three-act play; the world cannot be broken down into rising action, climax, and falling action. O'Nan understands this. His characters, and by extension, the reader, have limited information; in his characters lives, things do not always resolve neatly.

This is a quiet, subtle story. It is about waiting, persevering, sacrificing, and hoping. There are no big, explosive moments. (Patty, for instance, never hides a file in a homemade apple pie). The dramatic high-points, such as Patty getting approved for conjugal visits in a prison trailer, are really understated compared to the fireworks in other novels.

What impressed me most about The Good Wife was its epic scope, contained in only 308 pages. By the time you reach the final page, you've been with Patty, and her son Casey, for nearly three decades. Patty has gone from a young woman in the blush of early adulthood, to late-middle age, while Casey transforms from a baby to a college graduate. There aren't a lot of novels that follows a person so intently as they change, not only psychologically, but physically. In a way, The Good Wife is like a hillbilly Bildungsroman. When I finished, I felt a profound sadness at leaving Patty, and I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that she'd grown up on the page.

O'Nan's literary style is as subtle as his storytelling. He writes short, matter-of-fact sentences, with very few adjectives, metaphors, or similes. I suppose that's how he's able to pack so much information into such a short book. Despite the unadorned prose, The Good Wife is eminently readable and never uninteresting.

One of the only quibbles I had in the entire book was Patty's prejudice towards the legal system in general, and public defenders in particular. I understand this was a character trait, but geez, lady, give it a rest. Based on the disclosed facts, your husband was guilty of murder. What did you expect your public defender to do? Change the very fabric of a past reality? Sure, ma'm, I make $40,000 a year and have 250 other clients, but I'll go right ahead and turn day into night and night into day, just as soon as I get done with my evening shift multiplying loaves at the Walk on Water Café. I know I'm biased on this score, but it's more than a little disconcerting how unrepentant and blame-displacing both Patty and Tommy turn out. They don't care about the victim; they don't care about taking responsibility; all they care about is finding someone else to take the fall. This is true to life, to be sure, but a little tough to swallow in a protagonist.

Another problem I had was the nature of Patty and Tommy's relationship. We enter the story the night Tommy gets arrested and never look back. There are no flashbacks and precious few remembrances of earlier, better days. Accordingly, we have to take it strictly on faith that Tommy is the kind of guy worth waiting 30 years for. (Frankly, from what we learn about him, he is not worth Patty's devotion).

In a way, The Good Wife is excruciating to read. There are times when you can palpably feel the weight of years stacked against Patty. There are times when her hopelessness becomes your own.

That sounds more depressing than I intended. Let's try again:

The Good Wife is a story of one life lost, one life wasted, and one life put on hold. It is told without bitterness; instead, the tone is melancholic, sometimes remorseful, but always, surprisingly, tinged with hope.