THE WORLD STILL MELTING

A drama of tangles and troubles among farm couples in 1980s Iowa.

Why people do what they do gets asked and asked here but never answered, nor is it a device that injects much interest into Wilson’s (Splendid Omens, 2004, etc.) conventional characters as they’re pushed around by a tireless plot. Fiftyish and childless Nance Riker’s husband, Harvey, is so mean and abusive that Nance grows interested in Vietnam vet Burton Stone, with whom she at long last finds love and passion. But when crabbed and vindictive Harvey finds out, he spoils a perfectly nice beer-and-cards party over at the Toblers’ place one night by getting a gun from his truck and killing his host, the good Paul Tobler, for the offense of having tried to mediate between Burton and the cuckolded Harvey. Thus Nance’s good friend Arlene Tobler is made a widow, Harvey goes to jail, and Nance is free to marry Burton Stone—though not without guilt for having somehow “caused” Paul’s death. There’ll be plenty of woe and atonement. With the Tobler house, now on Nance and Burton’s property, empty (Arlene went back home to South Dakota), vagabonds breaking in become a deep irritant to Burton, who rigs up a shotgun to scare anyone opening the front door (like the reader, Nance, thinks this is a stupid idea, but Burton says, “I told you: don’t worry. I was in Nam, wasn’t I?”). The “vagabond” whose knee gets shattered in the booby trap will be Arlene Tobler’s own grown (albeit strange) son, Peter, and the man who advises him to sue Nance and Burton—for a big bundle and successfully—is none other than the still-vindictive monster Harvey. Poverty will threaten, Burton will start drinking, a legal appeal will be rejected, and, through it all, Arlene and Nance will exchange long letters wondering just why these things happen.

Literary soap opera out on the land.