Doing hard time, as faithful spouse

To call Patty Dickerson a good wife certainly raises the bar for the rest of us. Stewart O’Nan’s latest heroine in “The Good Wife” is a saint and a steadfast soldier. At 27, Patty is six months’ pregnant with her first child when her husband, Tommy, goes out drinking to celebrate his first hockey goal of the season. He ends up in jail, caught red-handed at the scene of a burglary, homicide and arson.

Although her mother, who has always thought Patty could do better, urges her to move on, and even Tommy says he’ll understand if she leaves him, she remains stalwart through what turns out to be 28 long years of incarceration.

O’Nan recently celebrated another form of unshakable faith in his chronicle of the Boston Red Sox’s 2004 season, “Faithful,” written with Stephen King, but the irony was that the writers’ fealty was rewarded in spades with the team’s first World Series victory since 1918.

In his ninth novel, O’Nan considers crime and punishment from an arresting new perspective. Eschewing both the victim’s and criminal’s points of view, O’Nan instead focuses on how our penal system affects the perpetrator’s family -- in this case, the wife.

By adhering strictly -- and convincingly -- to Patty’s frame of reference, O’Nan severely limits our picture of the crime itself and of Tommy’s prison experience. We’re never sure who dealt the fatal blow to old Mrs. Wagner -- Tommy, or his buddy Gary. Nor are we clear about the circumstances behind Tommy’s transfer farther upstate in the middle of his sentence.

All we have to go on is Patty’s willfully hazy picture. The facts are beside the point: O’Nan’s intent is not to whip up indignation about a miscarriage of justice but to convey the repercussions of a carriage of justice.

The result is a cumulative portrait of a lifetime of hardships and humiliations, and one woman’s unswerving devotion and gumption in reaction to them. Tommy’s punishment becomes her punishment too, and their son’s.

As in “The Circus Fire: A True Story,” about the 1944 Hartford fire, and in “A Prayer for the Dying,” his novel about a post-Civil War diphtheria epidemic, O’Nan has done his research.

“The Good Wife” presents a disturbing picture of our rampant penal system, with its mandatory sentences, thickets of bureaucracy and countless obstacles discouraging family visits.

O’Nan has set “The Good Wife” in Russell Banks and Richard Russo territory: depressed, blue collar, upstate New York. After Tommy’s arrest, Patty’s landlord evicts her and she loses her factory job. She and her newborn son move in with her mother. Unable to afford a private lawyer, they are assigned a barely competent public defender. She wrangles work on her husband’s former road crew, where she puts in several years of hard labor patching potholes, clearing snow and grooming sports fields -- another way of marking time by “cleaning up after the seasons.” When an accident forces her to seek indoor employment, all she turns up are crushingly dull, low-paying positions at chain stores and restaurants. She “lives weekend to weekend,” measuring out her life in visits to Tommy in his maximum security prison.

O’Nan conveys the grinding routine, relentless poverty and grim prospects in dry, straightforward, muted prose that captures the colorlessness of Patty’s life. Well-chosen details -- including a waterbed, turntable and Walkman -- help pinpoint the passing decades. Patty masters the art of waiting. She puts her life on hold, but time passes anyway: Their son grows up, she eventually builds a career, they all age. O’Nan makes us understand what a lifeline the Family Reunion Plan is, with its conjugal visits in locked trailers behind barbed wire.

Readers may occasionally feel Patty is a patsy, taking loyalty too far with her sense of responsibility for Tommy’s happiness, her guilt about “walking around free while he’s locked up,” and her lack of anger at him, even when forced to acknowledge his history of robberies. Self-pity is one of the many luxuries she can’t afford: “She’s busy; there’s not a lot of time to sit around and feel sorry for herself. Plus -- she never forgets -- she’s not the one in jail.”

But the overriding reaction O’Nan evokes for his heroine is awed sympathy. “The Good Wife” is a quietly devastating, thought-provoking examination of love and loyalty -- old-fashioned family values -- that can’t be locked away.

Heller McAlpin is a regular contributor to Book Review and other publications.