AUTHOR: Ron Hansen
PUBLISHED: 2011
GENRE: Fiction
It's not easy to write a compelling story where the murder victim is dead by page 3, and the wife has confessed before the first chapter is over. Lucky for Ron Hansen, he has some crazy characters to work with.
I picked up this book because I had read Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy, a haunting tale about a young, beautiful nun who displays signs of the stigmata. I wasn't disappointed. There is something different about Hansen's writing, an intangible something that leaves the reader just a little off-kilter. I thought maybe it was the nature of Mariette that spurred it - all that spiritualism - but A Wild Surge had it too. There's a bluntness where one might expect poetry, countered by a gentleness and depth of character that is sometimes disquieting.
A Wild Surge is based on 1930s true story of Ruth Snyder, who convinced her lover, lingerie salesman Judd Gray, to kill her husband. (I'm not giving anything away here. It's pretty much all covered by chapter one.) Ruth is equal parts victim and perpetrator, seductress and swooner. Gray, miserable in his own marriage, is at first thrilled by the sinfulness of it all, but soon finds himself underwater. Shook loose of his moorings, he can't say no to his lover's requests.
Hansen makes the most of the news coverage and written accounts from the trial, as well as the defendents' jailhouse memoirs (awesomely titled Doomed Ship and My Own True Story - So Help Me God!). However, it's unlikely that most readers would know that Hansen was pulling from these outside sources, because he never steps outside the narrative and becomes a talking head. He lets the story tell itself, and builds his characters is such a way that the facts are presented in a natural way. It's a fascinating attempt to explain what was going through Snyder and Gray's heads, and the consequences their actions brought.
LENGTH: 256 pages
MAINSTREAM OR NOT: Not really
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes. And then read Mariette in Ecstasy. And then probably his other stuff, but I haven't gotten there yet.
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