Eggplant Wife

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Jill Robinson’s haunting title story is a fine anchor for a collection
of journeys into the tenuous realm of human nature. She delicately
juggles the frustrations of one emotional partner battling the frigid
walls of the other, as a husband moves his wife to the family farm and
begins a bizarre vigil in hopes that his drowned parents will return
from Hawaii. The recipes, a chilling bonus, chronicle the gradual
descent into madness and the fearful dénouement. The collection’s
first story, “Who Says Love Isn’t Love?”, presents another
sparring couple, this time in comic mode, well-matched in dumbfounded
reaction to his sister’s proposed lesbian marriage.

Partners and parents are the dominant players in Robinson’s themes of
love and of the isolations of country and city. Her characters spring,
eccentric and memorable, from Flannery O’Connor’s best. The
descriptions are pure poetry: “We came home to an ice palace, Bess
called it, all the plants frozen solid and all the pipes burst ... The
fish bowl, the fish, the shampoo, the bleach, and the strawberry liqueur
in the liquor cabinet.” The middle two stories are not as strong, and
her refusal to use quotation marks becomes annoying, but the first and
last are worth the price of admission.