Chacter types: Round, Flat, Deep, Pervese, Obsessed : Reliable Wife

The characters in "A Reliable Wife" are not rounded characters and they're not meant to be. Rounded characters are those who in some way seem to live off the page and outside of the book. They are characters who are more complex than the actual plot lines of the book allow them to be; that is, they are likely to take an action or express a thought or feeling that in some sense has nothing to do with the plot of the book. Imagine you are a character, living within a "plot." There will be a thousand, a million things you do every day that have nothing to do with the plot of your life. A rounded character behaves in the same ways - the plot is their confine, but their life extends beyond it. They surprise us. Distinguish these from flat characters, who are nothing but accumulations of characteristics (effective for satire, and for pulp fiction, in which we want the character to live within certain conventions and we want to know the character by quirks and tics). Goolrick's main characters in Reliable Wife - Ralph Truitt, Catherine Land or whatever her real name is, and in Part 2 Antonio - are not round but they are deep - deep like the needle that pierces Truitt's palm. They are obsessed and perverse to a high, gothic degree - and like all obsessed characters they are driven by one single force. In this case the driving force is self-loathing and the need for revenge. Each of these perverse characters is damaged by a horrible childhood, and each is motivated by a driving need for revenge against an evil parent/step parent: this is pretty primitive stuff, both from a psychological and literary POV, but it's fuel that drives this story forward. Where's it heading? No place good, I suspect.