A Meaning For Wife: Free Kindle Excerpt
Publisher Description
Your wife is killed by a cashew (anaphylactic shock), but there isn't time to grieve because your toddler son is always at your heels—wanting to be fed, to be played with, or to sleep next to you all night long. A change of pace seems necessary, so you decide to visit your parents in order to attend your twenty-year high school reunion. What begins as a weekend getaway quickly becomes a theater for dealing with the past—a past that you will have to re-imagine in order to have any hope of a future for you and your son.
Told in second person, A Meaning for Wife is the story of a man trying to come to terms with the sudden death of his wife, the aging parents he has long avoided, and the tribulations of single parenthood.
Mark Yakich is the author of two poetry collections, Unrelated Individuals Forming A Group Waiting to Cross (Penguin Books, 2004) and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin Books, 2008). He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches English at Loyola University.
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In his debut novel, poet Yakich (The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine) uses the second person to tell the story of a high school English teacher whose wife dies after ingesting a cashew, leaving him a single dad to his almost toddler son, Owen. Our unnamed narrator flies with Owen to his home town (Chicago) to spend a weekend with his parents (schizophrenic father, a bedroom reeking of cat urine, and refrigerators holding "moldy fruits" and "green meats") and attend his 20th high school reunion. What starts off as a novel about grief and coping bogs down when the narrator meets up with his old high school friends. The scenes are filled with wistful remembrances of old crushes and small talk, and while the voice is delightfully strong and there is potential for comedy and drama, the shadow of the wife's death kills the buzz. Yakich writes with a poetic economy and a matter-of-fact lyricism, and his masterful use of second person suggests that the narrator is witnessing his life from an outside perspective. But the book suffers from his inability to connect with other people and the reader has difficulty making an emotional connection to him. Brilliant in flashes and an auspicious first effort.
