Book-Browsing In the Obituaries
On May 19, the New York Times carried an extended obituary of a Scottish novelist named Elspeth Barker. The following day, the Times ran an extended obituary of an American novelist named Robert Goolrick. Ms. Barker died on April 21 at the age of 81. Mr. Goolrick died on April 29 at the age of 73. Until I read these obituaries, I had never heard of either writer. But what I read about their lives was so intriguing that I ordered novels by each of them almost immediately.
For most of her life, Elspeth Barker (pictured above) endured what the New York Times called a “ramshackle existence.” Born Elspeth Langlands, in 1940, she was raised in a neo-gothic castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where her parents operated a prep school for boys. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she majored in classical literature. At the age of 22, she entered into a long-term relationship with a philandering British poet named George Barker, who was 28 years her senior. Over the course of their nearly thirty-year union she gave birth to five of George Barker’s children (he sired another ten children with other women). For much of her adulthood, Elspeth taught Greek and Latin in an all-girls school to help support her family. Elspeth and George finally married in 1989, two years before his death in October of 1991. A month or so after George’s death, Elspeth, now 51, published her first and only novel, O Caledonia. It is the tale of a Scottish girl named Janet, who is raised in a neo-gothic castle called Auchnasaugh, which sounds a lot like Drumtochty Castle, where the author spent much of her childhood.
In the opening paragraph of the novel, Barker describes the “great stone staircase” of Auchnasaugh, a dark and ominous piece of architecture partially lighted by a creepy stained-glass window which carries the Latin motto: Moriens sed Invictus (dying but unconquered). At the bottom of the staircase lie the cold hard flagstones of the hallway. “Here it was that Janet was found,” Barker writes, “oddly attired in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted and slumped in bloody, murderous death.”
It is a classic opening for a traditional crime novel. But what follows isn’t really a crime novel at all. The book was republished in England in 2021, with an introduction by British novelist Maggie O’Farrell. She writes, “Despite this opening, O Caledonia is not a whodunit; do not expect a tense search for a criminal.”
The book was commissioned in 1990 by Alexandra Pringle, a publisher at Virago, a British feminist press. She had seen some pages that Barker had written, presumably pages of a memoir or a largely autobiographical work of fiction. And based on those pages, she encouraged the author to expand the story into a novel. The tale of young Janet, a lonely girl growing up in a bleak and sparsely-populated Scottish coastal region in a dank old castle populated by eccentrics, seems to be based fairly closely on Barker’s own childhood. Like Barker, Janet is a loner whose greatest pleasures are reading, language, and exploring the natural world.
Janet’s murdered body is described on page one and then largely forgotten for the next 200 pages as Barker tells the story of her often-troubled childhood. In the book’s final two or three pages, Barker throws in a rather desultory description of Janet’s murder, identifies a culprit, and then brings the story to a close. This is all tossed off in such an offhand manner that I suspect it was a suggestion from Barker’s editor or publisher. It’s as if someone at Virago told Barker, “If you kill Janet on page one and then identify the murderer on the final page, we can market this book as a gothic thriller and sell a lot more copies.” This happens more than you might think in so-called “serious literary fiction.” In the opening pages of Run River (1963), Joan Didion’s first novel, a man kills his wife’s lover and the reader is given the impression that this will be a crime story. But it really isn’t. A murder in chapter one is the homage that serious literature pays to pulp fiction.
The book has become a cult classic in Britain and has many high-profile champions, such as novelists Ali Smith and Barbara Trapido. It seems particularly popular among the type of elitists who eschew plot and worship sentences. It is frequently compared to more famous novels about girls living in dilapidated gothic castles, particularly Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle.” I love both of those novels and, sadly, I don’t think O Caledonia measures up to them. All three are well written, but only Smith’s and Jackson’s novels are also well plotted. It’s clear that Barker set out to write a memoir of her childhood. Somewhere along the line, perhaps due to marketing considerations, she tacked on a murder. But her heart certainly wasn’t in it. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’d probably have enjoyed the book more if it weren’t still being marketed as a crime tale. The plot summary on the back of the recent Weidenfeld & Nicolson reprint emphasizes Janet’s murdered body lying at the bottom of the great stone staircase. It sets up expectations that Barker never even attempts to fulfill.
But now let’s take a look at the life and work of Robert Goolrick (above), who died eight days after Elspeth Barker. Like her, he was a literary latecomer. He was born August 4, 1948, in Charlottesville, Virginia. For much of his adult life he was a successful advertising executive in New York City. According to his Times obituary, a commercial he created for Foster’s beer became somewhat of an industry sensation. Mumm Champagne was another one of his high-profile accounts. For reasons unspecified in his obituary, he was fired from Grey Advertising in 2002, at which point, now 54 years old, he reinvented himself as a writer. The first book he wrote was a gothic chiller called A Reliable Wife. While searching for a publisher for that novel, he wrote a scorching memoir of his childhood called The End of the World As We Know It: Scenes From a Life. It was published by Algonquin Books in 2007 and sold well. It also created a rift between him and his brother and sister. Goolrick claimed that his wealthy, socially prominent parents were alcoholics who abused him terribly. He specifically claimed to have been raped by his father, an accusation that didn’t go over well with his brother, Chester, who didn’t speak to him for years afterwards and still claims that their childhood “was idyllic.” Goolrick’s sister also was offended by the memoir.
The success of the memoir made it much easier for Goolrick to find a publisher for A Reliable Wife. It was published in 2009, when the author was 61. This is the book I ordered after reading Goolrick’s obituary. Unlike O Caledonia, this book didn’t disappoint the mystery-lover in me. It is marketed as a gothic thriller, and that’s exactly what it is. My mother, who died in 2020, was a devout reader of the gothic romance novels that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s. The house I grew up in was filled with cheap paperbacks written by Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis Whitney, and many others. Almost all of these novels featured cover art that showed a frightened young woman fleeing from a dark and ominous mansion. The trope became so ubiquitous that if you Google “women running from houses,” you’ll find numerous websites devoted to preserving those old gothic book covers.
Most contemporary gothic romance novels are essentially retellings of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, which itself was a retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847. They usually involve a lovely but penniless young woman who finds herself living in a creepy old mansion with a handsome but remote older man who is harboring a dark secret (or two) from his past. This may sound like a put-down of the genre, but it isn’t intended to be. The best gothic-romance novelists have always been able to find impressive ways to work their own original ideas into the timeworn formula. Like the sonnet, the gothic romance is a formula that allows for infinite interesting variations. And A Reliable Wife is a very good variation on the old formula. The novel opens in a remote town in Wisconsin in the winter of 1907. It is cold and snowy outside and the town’s wealthiest man, 54-year-old Ralph Truitt, is waiting at the train station for the mail-order bride who is coming to him from Chicago. Truitt is a widower who was once married to a vivacious but faithless young Italian woman. Eventually she ran off with her Italian music teacher. Later, she fell upon hard times and died in poverty. Truitt has lived alone for twenty years, on a grand estate, maintained by a husband and wife who cook and clean and run the property for him. He owns a massive iron-works in town that supplies employment to nearly everyone who lives nearby. Recently he advertised in several large Midwestern newspapers for “a reliable wife.” Having been brought nothing but misery by his beautiful first wife, he is now looking for a plain woman, someone reliable but not flashy. Many women submitted an application for the position along with the requisite photograph. The woman he chose is named Catherine Land, the daughter of a Christian missionary father. She is in her mid-thirties and has been left in dire financial straits by the death of her father. The photograph that accompanied her letter to Truitt revealed her to be a plain-looking woman in very drab clothing. Because the newspapers from Chicago and St. Louis and other large Midwestern towns occasionally make it to this small Wisconsin town, everyone there knows that their wealthy employer is expecting the arrival of a plain but reliable wife on the next train from Chicago. Which is why so many of them seem to have surreptitiously gathered at the station.
But all of these onlookers – as well as Truitt himself – are surprised when Catherine Land emerges from the train and reveals herself to be a stunningly beautiful woman, clearly not the same woman who posed for the photograph that accompanied her letter to Truitt. Ralph Truitt himself is furious at this deception. He cannot allow himself to appear to be the victim of a con in front of so many of his social inferiors, so he acts unsurprised by Catherine’s appearance as he leads her to the carriage that will carry them both to his home outside of town. But he is determined to send this woman, whom he suspects is nothing more than a cheap gold-digger, on her way as soon as it is possible to do so without creating a scene.
It is true that Catherine Land is not exactly what she claimed to be in her letter. But Truitt himself is hiding some fairly big secrets from Catherine as well. Over the course of its 320 enjoyable pages the book takes plenty of wild twists and turns, some of which a diehard fan of gothic romances will probably be able to anticipate, and some of which may actually bring the reader a genuine surprise. Had it been published in 1972, the novel might’ve earned the kind of praise usually reserved for the genre’s greatest practitioners. In any case it became a huge bestseller. Despite not having been reviewed by the New York Times, it spent nearly a year on the Times’ trade-paperback bestseller list. For three of those weeks it was number one.
I liked the book a lot, but I’ve noticed that some of the readers who commented on it at Amazon.com and Goodreads objected to its sex scenes, which are more graphic than anything you’d find in the works of Mary Stewart or Daphne du Maurier. But, nowadays, plenty of mainstream romances contain fairly steamy sex scenes. If you can handle the sex scenes in, say, Diane Gabaldon’s Outlander series of romantic fantasies, you’ll have no difficulty with the sex scenes in A Reliable Wife.
Despite publishing his first novel even later in life than Elspeth Barker published hers, Goolrick managed to turn out three more books in the time remaining to him. In 2012 Algonquin Books brought out his second novel, Heading Out To Wonderful. For the longest time, while reading this novel, I found that it compared favorably with Delia Owens’ monster bestseller of 2018, Where the Crawdads Sing, a book I loved. Both stories begin within a few years of the end of World War II. Both take place in small towns in Southern states along America’s Eastern Seaboard (Virginia for Goolrick’s novel; North Carolina for Owens’s). Though both paint a somewhat nostalgic portrait of mid-twentieth-century America, both novels are keenly aware of the racial and gender prejudices of the era. Neither book can be classified as a conventional crime or mystery novel, but both novels involve accusations of rape, a murder, and a criminal trial. In both novels, I found that the trial sequence turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, underdeveloped and somewhat anticlimactic. But the trial sequence was pretty much the only part of Crawdads that underwhelmed me. The rest of the book possessed, for me, pretty much all of the qualities that have made To Kill a Mockingbird a perennial classic: a fascinating young female protagonist, a stultifying small town atmosphere, the destruction of youthful innocence, and a celebration of the power of ordinary human decency. Sadly, I can’t say the same for Goolrick’s novel. He spends the first 250 pages of the novel convincing the reader of the innate decency of his protagonist, a thirty-something military vet named Charlie Beale who now works in a butcher shop in sleepy Brownsburg, Virginia. Though Beale comes across as decent in these pages, he never comes across as perfect. Indeed, the novel is mostly an account of his torrid affair with a young hillbilly girl who has been sold by her impoverished father into a loveless marriage with a wealthy real estate tycoon more than twice her age. The reader happily forgives Beale for this sin because the young woman, Sylvan Glass, derives great joy from the affair. The adulterous lovers are portrayed as fairly kind and sympathetic people, while the man they are cuckolding, Harrison Boatwright Glass, is a violent brute and a horrible husband. But in the final forty pages of the book, both Charlie and Sylvan seem to become completely different people. Sylvan, coerced into it by her husband, commits a shocking act of betrayal against Charlie. Though out of character for her, the betrayal is mitigated somewhat by the fact that she had a legitimate reason to fear what her husband might do to her and her family if she didn’t go along with his plan. Nonetheless, three weeks later, she bravely attempts to undo the damage she has caused to Charlie’s reputation. She does this knowing that her husband will punish her for it, so the reader can’t help but wonder why she didn’t summon this courage three weeks earlier. But the change in Charlie’s character is even more drastic, and far less believable. He turns into more of a monster than even Harrison Boatwright Glass. Sure, he has been put through an emotional wringer by this time, but he has been demonstrating nerves of steel throughout the vast majority of the novel’s pages. Why would he suddenly lose his cool now and turn into a maniac of epic proportions? I realize that contemporary news reports are full of seemingly ordinary people who snap at some point and commit horrible acts. But usually, when investigators dig into the backgrounds of these shy, quiet types, they find signs that something was wrong with them all along, signs that everyone in their orbit simply failed to see or chose to ignore. That’s not the case with Charlie Beale. Goolrick didn’t give us any reason to anticipate the kind of transformation that Charlie undergoes in the final few pages of the novel. And, for me, that pretty much ruined the reading experience. Which is a real shame, because, for the longest time, I thought I had found a book worthy of shelving alongside Mockingbird and Crawdads. Heading Out to Wonderful may have been a noble failure, but it was a failure nonetheless.
In 2015 Algonquin published The Fall of Princes, Goolrick’s take on the excesses of New York City’s movers and shakers in the 1980s. It is said by reviewers to bear a resemblance to books such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Dominick Dunne’s People Like Us, and Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
And speaking of Dominick Dunne, his life and work seem to have been inspirations to Robert Goolrick. Like Goolrick, Dunne had a successful first career, as a TV and film producer, that lasted for decades. But a divorce, the murder of his daughter, and having his Hollywood star eclipsed by the meteoric success of his brother (John Gregory Dunne) and sister-in-law (Joan Didion), who co-wrote the screenplay for the hit 1976 film A Star Is Born, caused him to turn to drugs and alcohol for solace, and it nearly ruined his life. Eventually, however, he sobered up and, sometime around the age of sixty, reinvented himself as a writer of pop-fiction bestsellers. His specialty was exploring the rot and dishonesty at the heart of many great American fortunes. His books tended to focus especially on the damage wealthy American men can wreak upon the most vulnerable women in their orbit. These elements are found also in Goolrick’s books, both the memoir and the novels. His final novel, 2018’s The Dying of the Light, is a tale of wealth and depravity at the top of the American social register, and written very much in the dishy style of Dominick Dunne’s best work.
The Dying of the Light is the story of Diana Cooke, born in 1900 to one of Virginia’s most prestigious families. The family manor, Saratoga, is reputed to be the largest and grandest private home in America. Alas, by 1919, the Cooke family has fallen on hard financial times. Diana’s father has only way of staying off penury. He must marry off his only daughter to a man with a fabulous fortune (the word “fabulous” will appear frequently in this review, because the book often takes on the quality of a fairy tale). Luckily, Diana is the most beautiful and accomplished debutante of her generation, and just about every wealthy bachelor on the Eastern Seaboard desires her hand in marriage. Unfortunately, she chooses to marry the fabulously wealthy Captain Cooperton, who is more than twenty years her senior. Yes, he has a vast fortune, but after the marriage he quickly reveals himself to be a sadistic cad. He rapes his wife repeatedly. Sometimes, after raping her, he will tie her arms and legs together, put a gag in her mouth, and then retire to his own bedroom for the night, leaving Diana in agony until her maid finds her in the morning and releases her from her bonds. Miraculously, she somehow manages to give the man a son, Ashton, the result of one of these many scenes of marital rape. Copperton is not a well-developed character. He is little more than a moustache-twirling villain from an old silent film. He abuses animals, humiliates his in-laws (driving them both to an early grave), calls his African-American servants by the N-word, and is thoroughly unlikeable. Even he describes himself as a cad. Early in their courtship, he tells Diana, “I’m an utter black-hearted cad, and I mean to sweep you off your feet and marry you as soon as possible…I grew up in Cadstown, USA, and attended Cadsville University, from which I graduated with high honors. I fought a duel and killed a man.” Alas, Diana assumes he must be exaggerating his awfulness. If anything, he’s underplaying it.
Copperton proved so oppressively horrible a character that I felt certain that I’d never finish the book. If I’m going to spend an entire novel enduring the boorish behavior of a cad he had better be a beautifully drawn character, along the lines of Humbert Humbert. Fortunately, Copperton dies violently (steeplechase, horse-fall) well before the book reaches the 100-page mark. And it is at this point that the story’s gothic elements are unleashed. In his will, Copperton left everything in trust to his son, Ash, but only if he is educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and then Yale University in Connecticut. This means that Diana must send the joy of her life off at the age of thirteen to be educated in faraway places. During this time, she holes up in her fabulous mansion, with her faithful cook and man servant (Priscilla and Clarence, respectively, a married couple), and immerses herself in the library full of great literature in expensive leather-bound volumes that her father and grandfather collected over many decades.
In 1941, Ash, age 21 and a recent graduate of Yale, finally comes back to Saratoga to spend some quality time with his mother, whom he as seen little of over the previous eight years. Alas, he also brings back a handsome young classmate of his Gibson Fitzgerald Cavenaugh, whose middle name is surely meant to evoke Nick Carraway, another impoverished young man who frequently attaches himself to wealthy people. At any rate, everyone refers to this young man simply as Gibby. Despite the twenty-year difference in their ages, Diana and Gibby develop an instant attraction to one another. Naturally they hide this attraction from Ashton, which is easy to do in a multi-storied mansion with “uncountable rooms,” and situated on 5,000 acres of Virginia forestland. Nearly every night, sometime around 3:00 a.m., Gibby sneaks into Diana’s bedroom and they engage in sex with wild abandon. As with the sex in A Reliable Wife, the sex here is described in the luridly purple terms of a pulp novel rather in the more smutty lingo (jizz, cunt, cooze) of a porno book:
What she wanted was the sweetness of his skin, his tongue against hers, and his penis painlessly inside her, the snake of love.
He kissed her lips. He licked her nipples. He sought her clitoris with his tongue in that way that always makes women both sad and happy.
If you enjoy this kind of overheated erotica (and I do), you’ll find plenty to like here.
Alas, there is more than one snake of love in this Garden of Eden. Unbeknownst to his mother, Ashton is a homosexual who has had a longtime crush on his old Yale classmate Gibby. He was always afraid to act on this crush in Connecticut, but on his own native stamping grounds of Virginia he is hoping he can find the courage to proclaim his love to Gibby and, he hopes, consummate it in bed. Unfortunately for Ash, Gibby is not gay and only has eyes for Ash’s mother. As you can see, these two trains are on the same track and headed in opposite directions. If Ashton should discover that his two favorite people in the world – his mother and his best friend – are fucking every night in secret under the roof of America’s biggest private home, well, then we’ve got the makings of a real old-fashioned gothic horror story.
To make things even more interesting, Goolrick introduces a few eccentric secondary characters into the mix. On the night that Ash and Gibby first arrive together at Saratoga, a violent storm causes a tree to come crashing into the mansion’s library and many of Diana’s beloved leather-bound treasures are seriously damaged by the rain. The next morning, seeing how distraught his mother is, Ash contacts the University of Virginia and asks them to recommend an expert in restoring damaged books. This brings Lucius William Walter, a 27-year-old book nerd, into the orbit of the Cooke-Copperton clan. Lucius is gay and a social outcast, so he finds himself very happy at Saratoga, where, for awhile at least, he seems to fit right in. He intentionally drags out his book-restoration project so as to stay at the mansion as long as possible. He is also highly attuned to the sexual inclinations of others, and he quickly figures out where the various parties – Diana, Gibby, Ash – stand in relation to one another.
Because the house has been neglected for many long years, Ash, who has recently come into his vast inheritance, also generously pays to bring the most sought-after home decorator in New York City to Saratoga, where she will spend several months overseeing a massive renovation of the tired old mansion. Like Lucius, Rose de Lisle isn’t exactly who she appears to be. She too has an ability to pick up on the erotic tensions between people with uncanny accuracy. And, also like Lucius, she hopes to milk the Saratoga project for as long as possible, both because she wants to pad her bank account with Ash’s money, and because he she likes it there, likes watching the family psychodrama unfold before her eyes.
As you can see, we have enough plot and enough oddball characters to keep the pages turning furiously. Many of the usual Goolrick trademarks are here. In all three of the novels I have read, an important character drowns. In two of these cases, the drowned person is brought back to life by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In all of the Goolrick novels I have read, real-estate is an obsession of the main characters. Inheritances figure prominently in all three novels. Also, quite melodramatically, sudden shocks cause a character in all three Goolrick novels to suddenly become a serious alcoholic despite never before demonstrating any such weakness.
I noted earlier that all modern American gothic novels owe their existence to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, both of which culminate in the destruction by fire of a great family mansion, Thornfield Hall in the former and Manderley in the latter. We know from the beginning of The Dying of the Light that this fate awaits Saratoga as well. The novel’s catchy opening line is: “It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” That could serve as the opening line to hundreds of gothic novels through the years. When Ashton first arrives at Saratoga with his beloved Gibby, the vibe is similar to the scene in Rebecca when Maxim de Winter first arrives at Manderley with his second wife.
Goolrick’s novel also appears to be in conversation with Joan Didion’s aforementioned novel Run River, a book whose story of sexual betrayal unfolds alongside the sleepy Sacramento River (which passes within a mile of my Sacramento home) in much the same way as Diana’s story unspools alongside the Rappahannock River, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The chapter in which Diana first lays eyes on Gibby ends like this:
It was time for Diana Cooke Copperton to love again.
Let the river run.
Elsewhere in the novel, the river’s running will be evoked to characterize the hot blood running through Diana’s veins.
Although the novel ends in tragedy, the denouement doesn’t come completely out of the blue. Unlike the ending of Heading Out To Wonderful, the climax of this book doesn’t come about as a result of characters behaving in ways that were previously never even hinted at. Which makes this a much more successful novel, a worthy capstone to Goolrick’s short but impressive writing career. Goolrick, like Dominick Dunne, wasn’t writing for literary snobs. This is commercial pop fiction and possesses many of that genre’s charms and some of its shortcomings as well. It is compellingly plotted and filled with deliciously purple prose (Her heart suddenly beat faster. She was Red Riding Hood, and she had met the Wolf.). It is also far-fetched and populated by various Southern Gothic stereotypes (the Yankee cad, the land-rich but money-poor old Southern gentleman and his beautiful daughter, etc.). If you’d rather spend the weekend with Proust, be my guest. But if you’re just looking for an exciting page-turner to curl up with on a cold winter’s night (or sultry summer afternoon), you could do much worse than to seek out The Dying of the Light. And not all of its prose is purple. The book is filled with pithy bits of folk wisdom:
Guilt is the thing that eats your heart, and then the rest of you, until the sun of your life is eclipsed and you’re nothing but shade.
The history of the world is the history of the unspoken bond between strong women.
She had learned certain things in her life, and one of them was that if you think you’re getting fired, you are.
There’s no point in crying tomorrow’s tears today.
Southerners are born with a wistful longing to live in the past, to wrap themselves in it like a homespun garment and live there forever.
The only way to find something in the well-trodden battlefield of tragedy is to turn over every stone until the scorpion sinks its curved stinger into your wrist. You have to leave the part of the earth that everybody else has looked at, hoping to find the famous emerald, the essential Meissen. Because what you’re looking for is not here, hasn’t been here for decades.
There are plenty of good places to discover writers and books that may have escaped your notice in the past: bookstores, libraries, book reviews, internet message boards, the back pages of old paperbacks, etc. In addition to all those other places, keep an eye on the obituary pages of America’s leading newspapers. They may provide you with an introduction to a writer you’ve never heard of but whose work is well worth seeking out. If I hadn’t found his obituary in the Times, I might have missed out on the pleasures (and disappointments) of Robert Goolrick’s fiction.