An improbable wife: Could these things really happen?

Robert Goolrick, author of "A Reliable Wife, and I were in the same class in college (Johns Hopkins), and though we didn't know each other well I remember him as a nice guy and a good student, one of the few seriously interested in literature in that premed hothouse. I admire and honor him for the huge success of Reliable Wife, his first novel, published in his 60s. So many have loved this book, and I wish I liked it more, but as so often I find myself in the minority. As Goolrick notes in the brief interview at the end of the pb edition, the story is somewhat operatic. I'd agree, so reader be forewarned - the style, especially in the later chapters when Goolrick seems to look down at his characters godlike, from above, is way over the top, and there are scenes of the most high-camp unlikelihood: a character drowns beneath the blackened ice, chased across the frozen landscape by his enraged father wielding a fireplace poker while a gray Arabian steed rears in panic. Lots of steamy sex. Flowers blooming as the heroine sets foot on the wintery garden stalks. Goolrick also describes the story as one of sin and redemption, which it is in a sense - each of the protagonists, on initial appearance, is certainly steeped in sin and bitterness, hatred and self-loathing. Some of them do change - but is it a change that is "earned"? Or just imposed by the will of the author and the mechanics of the plot? Though Goolrick uses a simple refrain often through the novel - "Such things happened" - I'm not convinced that these things happened or could happen, horrible people undergoing a complete transformation, within a world in which almost all the minor characters are suicidal or insane. Were the main characters (Catherine Land and Ralph Truitt) really not so horrible in the first place? Possibly, but if that's so I feel rather manipulated and deceived by the initial portrait of each of them as obsessed with evil and the need for vengeance. I don't know. There's a lot here in this book, and I'm glad for Robert that it has touched so many readers, though I wasn't one of them.