Four generations of Dufore women try to make the best of their odd circumstances as they put up with Gran Marie's insomnia, Uncle Ab's tendency toward spontaneous combustion, Rich's second sight, and Paul's transformation into a fish.
The Wives' Tale was first published by W.W. Norton in 1991.
“There was a medicine show, freaks, including a most awe-inspiring fat lady, a human fetus in a bottle, a seal-boy, and a dog-faced girl. There was a sword swallower, a fire-eater, and a strongman, who nightly lifted up two chairs, a grown woman sitting in each one, over his head. There was a bearded woman, a dwarf, some trained dogs, and, of course, the juggler.”
from The Wives’ Tale
The Reviews
New York Times ~ Review by Howard Frank Mosher
"The remote hill country of Alix Wilber's fine and daring first novel, The Wives' Tale, is a far cry from the idyllic New England resorts advertised in travel magazines. Esperance, Ms. Wilber's wonderfully named Vermont hamlet, has no ski slopes, lavish summer homes or quaint country inns. Nor do we hear much about its spectacular autumn foliage or weathered covered bridges. Rather, Esperance is a harsher and truer place, where the local paper mill and a few run-down farms and four-corner garages provide all the employment there is, where every winter is long and the ensuing mud seasons are just 'a different kind of bad'...The best characters in The Wives' Tale are its tough-minded and enduring women. Their characteristics are drawn not from some dark collective family unconscious, but through their relationships with their men, with each other and with the natural cycle of rural life. Time and again their inner resources help them transcend their circumscribed existences. For example, rather than brood over the fact that her husband, Ab, never wrote her so much as a single love letter before taking his fateful plunge from the top of the maple tree, Mary Dufore composes a comforting batch of letters to herself, which she signs, 'Your loving husband, Abner.'“
Publishers Weekly
"A first novel packed with this much mesmerizing craziness is a rarity. A tale spanning four generations of the Dufore family of rural Esperance, Vt., Wilber's novel seems to have caromed off such influences as Twain, Vonnegut, Faulkner and even John Irving. Uncle Ab is doomed to burst into flames. Poor Davy is literally going soft and rotting like a piece of spoiled fruit. Bobby lives in dread of being hit by a meteor. Old Gran Marie hasn't slept in 70 years. Paul and his little son may have turned into trout. These idiosyncrasies form only a part of the patchwork heritage of the Dufore clan, and women who chose to marry a Dufore will have their hands full. Hilarity and horror overflow these pages in equal measure, sending out an intensely exuberant message that life goes on. This rich stew of a debut haunts and compels."
Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel ~ Review by Caren S. Niele
"For all its fantastical elements -- the novel plays like a heartland version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez`s One Hundred Years of Solitude -- this book achieves a rare feat more impressive even than its plot twists. What emerges from the bizarre humanscape is a sometimes darkly funny, often plangent meditation on the give and take of marriage...The Wives` Tale is not for the faint of heart, what with the above-noted disasters as well as a teen`s seduction of her brother and a bride`s bearing of her 16-year-old brother-in-law`s child. But the powerful imagery, the deft use of motifs such as tattoos, insects and the wind, and the well-drawn characters provide a strong foundation for the more disturbing descriptions."
Library Journal ~ Review by Rita Ciresi, formerly of Pennsylvania State University, now professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa
"Billed by its publisher as a novel that 'adds new dimension to the phrase American Gothic'...The Dufore family turns Esperance, Vermont into the suicide capital of the country...A rollicking account of eccentricities...four generations of the family shoot and slice themselves; they get squashed by meteors or go up in flames. In her fiction debut, Wilber demonstrates a fine ear for dialog and a talent for crisp description."
Seattle Times ~ Review by Donn Frye
“For a family drawn to suicide, bomb shelters and spontaneous combustion, the Dufores of Esperance, Vt., seem like a pretty normal group of folks. At least, compared with the LaStrange family, an amorphous clan of beery adults and unruly, snot-smeared kids with "fox-colored hair" and "wolf eyes" who inhabit a bullet-shaped trailer up the road. Literarily, if not genealogically, the LaStranges are first cousins to the Beans of Egypt, Maine...
“In a prose that vibrates nicely between the lyrical and the wryly grotesque, Wilber manages to carry off this craziness, to let fantasy bleed into realism in a way that makes a cockeyed kind of sense. When Allison Dufore Woodie escapes her loveless marriage on a motorcycle with Mike LaStrange, she sails away, wind-borne, "over the horizon and out of knowledge," when the machine bursts through the guard rail at Hundred Mile View. Her ascension is a perfect resolution, a searing image that brings to mind both the magic realism of Garcia-Marquez and the toughly romantic cinema of Thelma and Louise. Like them, it works.”
Kirkus Reviews
"A family saga, with murder, incest, oddball characters, a remote country setting--in fact, all the usual 'American Gothic'' ingredients with a light dusting of magical realism, Vermont-style, thrown in for literary good measure. Generations of Dufores have lived in Esperance in rural Vermont, but something about the family makes marriage to a Dufore a risky proposition. Locals talk of tainted blood, something that gets passed down: "In some families it's the sugar sickness, or a fondness for the bottle.'' And when great-grandson Daniel is brought back to be buried, Marie, well over 90, thinks it's time to 'review' all the events in her family's life. Her first husband, convinced that the apocalypse was nigh, had taken their only child and jumped into a nearby brook to live safely there as trout; her second husband, the father of the surviving Dufores, had literally rotted away; son Ab had died from spontaneous combustion; and son Rich was haunted by second sight. Grandson Dennis carried rocks in his pockets to stop him from flying away, and great-grandson Daniel, who once murdered a man to protect his young sister, a surviving Siamese twin, committed suicide because his head was crowded with stories demanding to be told. Each generation has courted and married, but the price--particularly for the wives--has always been high. Female Dufores have also been affected, though they tended to flee to the West, never to be seen again. Whatever the Dufores try, Marie decides, ‘life just seems to lead you where it wants you to go.'“
Paperback Swap ~ Review by Suzanne R.
"One of my all-time favorite books. And definitely my favorite book that no one has heard of. (My other favorites are usually award winners, like Shipping News and The God of Small Things). This was published in 1991, so it might be too much to hope that the author will write another book, but I keep hoping! This copy I'm posting is an extra that I found at a used book store -- I'll never part with my original that I bought in 1991! :)"