Every couple has its List.
She says: “I love you, baby, but if Matthew McConaughey ever looks my way, I have to go down on him.”
And, like most men, you probably have Angelina Jolie as your No. 1. “I don’t care if she rips off my head and devours me like a praying mantis,” you say, “I have to have her.”
Around our house, because we’re fans of “Big Love,” the HBO drama about polygamy, the List has a variation: Who would you want as a Sister Wife?
The life, as depicted on that show, does have its attractions. Mild-mannered Bill Paxton has three fascinating women as his wives: Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin.
Between that television show and all of the tremendous historical background in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, we’ve pretty much exhausted everything we know about the life of a polygamist.
So Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist (W.W. Norton, $26.95) isn’t just a great novel. It’s an insight to this world that seems at turns alien and repulsive, yet also attractive and fascinating.
Rather than looking at the polygamists the way we might look at zoo animals, Udall takes us inside the day-to-day life of Golden Richards, a man with four wives. His life is chaos, full of tragedy and heartbreak, and despite the four women in his household, he seeks solace with yet another woman.
It’s a beautifully written book and Udall is at his best in examining the motivation and meanings in the smallest moments of life.
There are elements of comedy, but The Lonely Polygamist fascinates mostly by giving us a cast of utterly believable characters living fascinating and claustrophobic lives.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2010.