The Good Wife: A Novel - Hardcover

O'Nan, Stewart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374281394 ISBN 13: 9780374281397

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

From a writer who reveals 'the plainness of everyday life with straightforward lyricism' (The New York Times Book Review), the story of one remarkable, average woman.

On a clear winter night in upstate New York, two young men break in to a house they believe is empty. It isn't, and within minutes an old woman is dead and the house is in flames. Soon after, the men are caught by the police. Across the county, a phone rings in a darkened bedroom, waking a pregnant woman. It's her husband. He wants her to know that he and his friend have gotten themselves into a little trouble. So Patty Dickerson's old life ends and a strange new one begins.

At once a love story and a portrait of a woman discovering her own strength, The Good Wife follows Patty through the twenty-eight years of her husband's incarceration, as she raises her son, navigates a system that has no place for her, and braves the scorn of her community. Compassionate and unflinching, The Good Wife illuminates a marriage and a family tested to the limits of endurance.

About this title

About the Author

Stewart O'Nan's novels include The Night Country, Snow Angels, The Speed Queen, and A Prayer for the Dying. Granta named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

The Good Wife, O’Nan’s ninth novel (after The Night Country *** Jan/Feb 2004), tells a compassionate, nonjudgmental tale about love, faith, blue-collar existence, prison life, and, above all, the ordinary act of waiting. Told in the present tense by an omniscient narrator, the novel delves deep inside its characters, particularly the hopeful Patty. Although he fails to fully develop her son, O’Nan limns Patty with sympathy and a sharp eye for all the period details that mark her long, difficult passage of time. The powerful yet "dry, straightforward, muted prose," notes the Los Angeles Times, aptly captures the "colorlessness of Patty’s life." Like O’Nan’s previous novels, The Good Wife is grim—and unforgettable.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Starred Review. Patty Dickerson, the resilient heroine of O'Nan's forceful, oddly moving ninth novel, is pregnant with her first child and waiting for her husband, Tommy, on a snowy night in the mid-1970s, when the phone rings. It's Tommy, and he's in jail after a robbery. He's been a thief for some time, a fact Patty has refused to acknowledge. Unfortunately, Tommy's latest escapade involves arson and death. Convicted of murder in the second degree, he receives a sentence of 25 years to life. The main story is Patty's, told in the present tense in quietly lyrical and observant prose: the struggle to make ends meet in an economically depressed upstate New York community, the shame of her son's father being in prison, the frustrating and humiliating treatment the penal system inflicts on prisoners and family alike. In a sense, Patty's life is on semipermanent hold over the 28 years Tommy spends in a correctional facility, but of course it isn't really: her son grows up, she visits her husband as often as she can, she works, mostly at dead-end jobs, and eventually she creates a career for herself. In other words, she makes a life that's both with and without her love. O'Nan (The Night Country) has completely captured Patty Dickerson and her dogged determination to endure in this sad but strangely hopeful story.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Incarceration can be a bum rap, not only for those serving time but also for the victim, the victim's family, and, as depicted in this sensitive and provocative fictional account, for the spouse of the imprisoned. Life behind bars has more than its share of miseries; it is extremely dangerous, monotonous, and regimented. But for a loving and committed wife, it's an entirely different kind of prison. Patty Dickerson, pregnant, is blindsided by the revelation that her husband, Tommy, has been involved in a number of robberies, and when a burglary goes terribly wrong and Tommy and his friend Gary are arrested and charged with murder, she is faced with the dilemma of having to figure out how to defend and support the man she loves as well as raise a child on her own. O'Nan's treatment of this painful ordeal is detailed and sympathetic, depicting the experience entirely through Patty's eyes, withholding any foreshadowing and passing no judgment. From the trial, through the various appeals process, the visits to the prison, the waiting, the hoping, the struggle to make ends meet, and the gradual resilience and self-sufficiency, O'Nan, with seldom a false beat, perceptively and compassionately depicts the bureaucratic insanities of the penal system and the hardships, fears, and frustrations of those left behind. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374281394
• ISBN 13: 9780374281397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308