A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen

In the Roaring Twenties, two addled jitterbugs commit a murder

Ruth Snyder, Swedish American party girl, is married to cheap grumpy Albert. Ruth has her various men friends, but once she meets Judd Grey, corset salesman, she embarks upon a sustained, sexually passionate love affair. Ruth gets an idea in her head about buying life insurance for Albert and convincing Judd to knock him off. Meanwhile, Ruth, Judd and Albert seem to be soused all the time. Judd and Ruth sickeningly pull off their murderous scheme, but are such drunken bumblers the cops figure it all out within a matter of hours (minutes?) Rather to their surprise, or Ruth’s surprise anyway, they are sentenced to die in the electric chair.

At first I didn’t like this novel. The dialogue seemed too stagey, but sometime after the first hundred pages, the story became gripping, a mixture of Three-Stooges-like comedy and genuine tragedy, an exploration of the pain caused by murder. Two dim bulbs commit murder thinking it will be easy. However, the actual murder is much harder than they thought, harder still because they are nearly blind drunk. And their trial and condemnation is not that funny either. The Catholic thing? Hmm, I guess the story has a sort of holy conclusion with the description of the execution and their two bodies lying on slabs ready to be autopsied. In the end, I could hardly put it down.

Exiles by Ron Hansen

It’s about dying


At first I was annoyed by the book’s setup – the many characters being introduced was like something out of the Towering Inferno. Laughable, really. Five young nuns in Germany, and the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. We learn their humble histories of why they decided to join religious orders and how the nuns came to be on the ship Deustchland, which ran aground in icy weather. The nuns froze to death and Hopkins wrote a poem about it. At a certain point, however, a tension begins to grow and the book becomes almost unbearable to read. How exactly will they die? And they all do – one by one. All six main characters have something in common – they have made a decision to try to live in a different way – to try to purge the ego of pride. But still to achieve something – in the nuns’s case – to help people. The practice of humility.

The counterpoint to the story of the doomed nuns is Hopkins’s daily life, his unsuccessful (so it seems) attempt to get traction with the Jesuits, the public rejection of his very weird poems. He was sort of a slight little nerd, and his poetry a passionate heartbeat. This book didn’t help me understand the connection. But it helped me understand some other things – by not overexplaining everything.