A review by david_wright
The Good Wife by Stewart O'Nan

4.0

The sadness of this book, the long life story of a woman whose husband goes to jail for murder while she is pregnant with his child, reminded me of the big open lost sadness of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, even though the story is far less sensational. This is America not as a place of cruelty and menace, as in Cormac McCarthy, or a place of unrealized dreams, or a place of great injustice - it is less definite than that. It is a place of disconnection, of small lives, modest hopes. Lives hemmed in by circumstance, by fate, by mere accident. Although O'Nan writes of working class people, it really is everyone's sadnes, deep down. That said, this is an extraordinarily sad story - a sadness without the comfort of sorrow or drama.