The world still melting /

Paul and Arlene Tobler are well acquainted with the backbreaking work and near-poverty that come with owning a farm in Iowa. Lately, Arlene has begun to wonder just what has come over Paul, who is caught in a mounting land feud with a group of bicyclists. He does not much resemble the patient, kindhearted man she married. Her best friend, Nancy, trapped in an unhappy marriage with the abusive Harvey, has begun a lusty affair with a younger neighboring farmer. One night while playing cards, all of their lives are changed forever when Harvey, drunk and enraged, turns violent. Wilson brings great compassion and biblical overtones to his story of small farmers under siege. He painstakingly details the rural mind-set, the obsession with land and property rights, and the often-harsh landscape. Like Jane Smiley's Shakespearean farm drama A Thousand Acres 0 (1991) and Kent Meyers' insightful short-story collection Light in the Crossing 0 (1999), Wilson's novel captures how the privations of farm life can foster extreme emotions and situations. --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2005 Booklist

Wilson began writing novels relatively late in his career; for many years he was best known as a short story writer (Dancing for Men, etc.). His third novel (after Splendid Omens, 2004) is a somber, dust-crusted tale of Iowa farm life and middle-aged love and disappointment. Arlene Tobler is in her 50s, a farm wife who once dreamed of being a schoolteacher and now finds refuge in reading. She and her husband, Paul, inhabit their farmhouse like two dry cornstalks ("her marriage like the ritual passage of a man and woman on tracks that paralleled but rarely crossed"). Elsewhere, love is blooming: the Toblers' neighbor, Nancy Riker, admits to Arlene that she's having an affair with another neighbor, Burton Stone, a sin for which everyone but the sinners will pay. Arlene narrates the first half of the novel, while Nancy picks up the tale in the second half as misfortunes multiply and old grudges fester. Two gun shots propel the story's action, but Wilson is more interested in the emotional toll of events than he is in their dramatic outcome. The novel makes it plain-perhaps excessively plain-that we pay for our mistakes, and that redemption is hard to come by. Agent, Robert Preskill. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This poignant, beautifully written story focuses on five people who live on neighboring farms in Iowa. Paul and Arlene Tobler, who sacrificed their professional aspirations when they inherited the farm from Paul's family, work hard and frequently interact with the unhappily married Harvey and Nancy Riker. Wilson (Splendid Omens) portrays farming as a tough way to eke out a living, shadowed by economic uncertainty, drought, and harsh Midwestern weather. When Nancy's affair with Burton Stone, a single younger neighbor, is discovered, problems escalate. Harvey accidentally kills Paul. Arson, jealousy, and manslaughter create desperate situations for all, particularly Nancy and Burton, now married and determined to change their luck. Then Paul's son Peter is maimed as a result of Burton's security booby-trap. How much can a person take? Where do loyalties end? Should one ever simply give up? Wilson examines these questions with compassion. Recommended and suitable for all libraries.-Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A drama of tangles and troubles among farm couples in 1980s Iowa. Why people do what they do gets asked and asked here but never answered, nor is it a device that injects much interest into Wilson's (Splendid Omens, 2004, etc.) conventional characters as they're pushed around by a tireless plot. Fiftyish and childless Nance Riker's husband, Harvey, is so mean and abusive that Nance grows interested in Vietnam vet Burton Stone, with whom she at long last finds love and passion. But when crabbed and vindictive Harvey finds out, he spoils a perfectly nice beer-and-cards party over at the Toblers' place one night by getting a gun from his truck and killing his host, the good Paul Tobler, for the offense of having tried to mediate between Burton and the cuckolded Harvey. Thus Nance's good friend Arlene Tobler is made a widow, Harvey goes to jail, and Nance is free to marry Burton Stone--though not without guilt for having somehow "caused" Paul's death. There'll be plenty of woe and atonement. With the Tobler house, now on Nance and Burton's property, empty (Arlene went back home to South Dakota), vagabonds breaking in become a deep irritant to Burton, who rigs up a shotgun to scare anyone opening the front door (like the reader, Nance, thinks this is a stupid idea, but Burton says, "I told you: don't worry. I was in Nam, wasn't I?"). The "vagabond" whose knee gets shattered in the booby trap will be Arlene Tobler's own grown (albeit strange) son, Peter, and the man who advises him to sue Nance and Burton--for a big bundle and successfully--is none other than the still-vindictive monster Harvey. Poverty will threaten, Burton will start drinking, a legal appeal will be rejected, and, through it all, Arlene and Nance will exchange long letters wondering just why these things happen. Literary soap opera out on the land. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.