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    The Good Wife
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    The Good Wife
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    The Good Wife
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Good Wife

    Written by Stewart O'Nan

    Narrated by Laural Merlington

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On a clear winter night in upstate New York, two young men break into 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 23, 2005
    ISBN9781597103282
    Unavailable
    The Good Wife
    Author

    Stewart O'Nan

    Stewart O’Nan’s award-winning fiction includes Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Emily, Alone. His novel The Odds was hailed by The Boston Globe as “a gorgeous fable, a stunning meditation and a hope-filled Valentine.” Granta named him one of America’s Best Young Novelists. He was born and raised and lives in Pittsburgh. 

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    Reviews for The Good Wife

    3.5/5

    137 ratings14 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I really felt for the the main character, Patty, as she struggles years of being a single mom following her husband's incarceration. I guess I expected the narrative to go somewhere, however. I caught myself checking to see how many pages remained in the book and wondering if there was enough space for the surprise or dramatic plot twist that never occurred. Years go by in Patty's life, sometimes in the span of one page, where nothing major happens. Perhaps the reader is expected to simply endure, like Patty must, but it doesn't make for especially good reading.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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
    • 3/5
      I read (and watch) plenty of police procedurals, so this was an interesting change -- the protagonist isn't a detective or a vengeful survivor, but a young, pregnant newlywed whose husband has just been arrested for murder in a burglary gone awry. The novel moves us through the trial, appeal, and almost thirty years of incarceration.The author never suggests that the husband is innocent, but he doesn't demonize him either. It really isn't about him at all; instead, we watch a woman struggling to raise her son and keep her family as intact and normal as possible, despite financial difficulties, social stigma, and the casual cruelty of the prison system.
    • 4/5
      When her husband is convicted of the murder of an elderly, blind woman during a home invasion, Patty is left on her own to raise their son while Tommy serves out his 25-year sentence. Stewart O'Nan is a master at allowing his readers to see the characters' lives fom both the wide perspective and the narrower day-to-day existence. Patty's loyalty to her husband results in a life restricted by prison rules and regulations. It is a sad story because the consequences of his terribly bad decision on one night result in more than one lost life.
    • 4/5
      Very sympathetic portrait of wife of a convict. But is he innocent or guilty?
    • 5/5
      O'Nan is a favorite author of mine, and he didn't disappoint with this one. When the book opens, it is the mid-1970s. Patty Dickerson is pregnant, laying in bed waiting for her husband Tommy to get home from his hockey game. Unbeknownst to her, Tommy and a friend have been robbing homes and selling the stolen items for extra cash. They plan to break into a home owned by an elderly woman who is supposed to be out for the evening. Unfortunately for all involved, she is home, and things spiral out of control, and the woman is killed. Excellent storytelling of the trial and Patty and Tommy's life in the aftermath of the trial. Interesting look at how quickly a good life can go bad and how the people involved react to the changes. This reader was left wondering how many of us would be as loyal as Patty was to Tommy and if she made the right decision. Excellent book and highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book, Steward O`Nan has the ability to describe what this woman feels under these circumstances and because of this it wasn`t boring to me. How she chances when she gets older and still holds on to her husband, carefully and patient without losing herself. And still patient and strong when he comes back , happy to have him even when it`s not that easy.
    • 3/5
      I like the way O'Nan writes in a conversational tone. The Good Wife was a bit slow and boring, but I liked it none-the-less. I can't imagine loving and believing in someone so completely for so long without questioning guilt!
    • 5/5
      Brilliant use of telling. If I taught, I'd use him for my classes.
    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this book. I don't think I could have made the decision to stick by a husband who was convicted of murder.
    • 3/5
      An odd book, about a woman's life for the 20+ years her husband was in prison. It went back and forth between a very high vantage point of her life: years passing in summary; to miniscule detail of a day, so much so that it seemed pretentious even though nothing really happened.
    • 5/5
      Wow! What a surprise this one was! It is a very compelling work. It took me to a place I could never imagine and made me question the main character's choices. If this is a good wife, then I am afraid I would not be, in her situation.