Lansens, Lori

THE WIFE’S TALE

Searching for the husband who disappeared on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, an obese woman changes her life.

The mystery in Lansens’s follow-up to The Girls (2006) is not why long-suffering Gooch left but what took him so long. Four-hundred-pound Mary has pushed him away for years, distrusting and refusing every gesture of affection. She has been under the sway of what she calls “the obeast” since childhood; she and Gooch fell in love as seniors in high school, after a parasitic infection caused a sudden weight loss.

A gifted writer, Gooch gave up his college dreams to marry Mary when she became pregnant. But she miscarried before the wedding, her weight returned, and it increased even more once she learned she could not have children. For years Gooch has tried to interest Mary in the larger world, or in himself, but her only passion has been food. He goes missing after depositing $25,000 from a scratch-and-win lottery game into their joint checking account.

Devastated, she is finally galvanized to leave their small Ontario hometown to look for him. Serendipitous events follow. Restaurant receipts lead her to Toronto, where she finds Gooch’s long-lost sister, who says he’s headed to see his estranged mother in Golden Hills, Calif. On the curb outside LAX, a kindly limo driver picks up Mary and arranges a salon makeover before dropping her at her mother-in-law’s house. Gooch isn’t there, but while waiting for him in California Mary befriends a divorcee with triplets and a hunky Mexican-American gardener. She warms to Gooch’s prickly mother, whose revelations force Mary to reexamine her marriage. Meanwhile, she loses her appetite. By the time she accepts that Gooch may not return, she is svelte and eating only for the right reasons.

Readers will still be hungry: While Mary’s evolution is all too predictable, Lansens never adequately explains the more enigmatic, sympathetic Gooch.

Redemption Lite.

The weight of a woman

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Mary Gooch’s biggest problem is not the size of her body, but the scope of her world. At just over 300 pounds, the 43-year-old Canadian is well aware that she’s fat; she has resigned herself to being that way. What she doesn’t realize, though, is the degree to which her weight has insulated and isolated her from the rest of society. She’s spent years in denial about how sheltered her life is, and when she’s forced to see it, the shock is worse than any she’s ever felt upon catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Mary has been quietly accumulating pounds for years when her husband, the tall, handsome Jimmy Gooch, fails to come home one night—specifically, the night before their 25th wedding anniversary. Eventually he sends a note explaining that he has left $25,000 from a winning scratchlottery ticket in their joint bank account, and that he needs “time to think.” At a loss, Mary sets out to find him, using the only clues she has: his family connections in California, some restaurant receipts and not much else.

Lori Lansens, best-selling author of “The Girls,” structures “The Wife’s Tale” as the story of a damaged heroine on a quest. The trick is that (as in any good quest story) the real object of the search isn’t what the searcher thinks it is.

Mary’s pursuit of her husband draws her slowly back into the world she’d been hiding from. She takes her first airplane flight, gets a makeover, stands up to her boss and her difficult mother-in-law, makes new friends, learns how to use an ATM card. She finds hidden reserves of endurance; she loses her appetite and her certainty about what her life is built on.

Occasional traces of hackneyed sentiment slip into the novel, but the fast-moving story and Mary’s gradual metamorphosis overcome such flaws easily. By the novel’s satisfying end, Mary has learned that it’s better to strive for balance and control than to hide behind one extreme or another. It’s not a simple transformation, and even if it’s not quite realistic, it certainly rings true.

The Wife's Tale

RT Rating: 4 stars

This uplifting story illustrates how a life can be transformed at any time, even if it seems stuck in a permanent rut. Mary is wonderful and someone readers will immediately want to know more about. Lansens' memorable journey takes Mary out of her comfort zone and reintroduces her not only to the world beyond but also to herself.

Summary: There was a time when Mary Gooch was slender and up for anything.

But more than two decades later, she's experienced disappointments and regrets while her body has grown to 302 pounds. The well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator attests to this. On the night before their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary realizes that her husband, Jimmy - still the handsome athlete of their high school days - is gone. Was it her size or aversion to adventure that's sent him running?

Jimmy's disappearance pierces Mary's lethargy. She decides to get on a plane for the first time in her life and fly to Los Angeles to search for her husband. Although he proves elusive, Mary is reunited with someone she barely remembers - herself!