Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood

by Stanley Crawford

Overview

From "Putting Things Away" to "The Marriage Almanac" (not to mention the pedantic "Index," in itself a comic wonder), Stanley Crawford gives the married, the unmarried, and the formerly married a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. Starting with the complete title, "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood," a boorish narrator sets down some seventy-three pieces of advice to his wife, young son, and two-year-old daughter, intended to foster and maintain domestic tranquility in an age of anxiety. Taken literally, our neo-Victorian head of the house is a male chauvinist pig of sorts, but what reader would deny that the sources of Crawford's satire run deep in the American grain?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780916583156
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	11/01/1985
Series:	American Literature
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	178
Product dimensions:	5.53(w) x 8.53(h) x 0.57(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Stanley Crawford has written and farmed with his wife Rosemary in Northern New Mexico since 1969. He is the author of five novels and three works of nonfiction and has been the recipient of two NEA writing fellowships and a three year Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writing Award. Recently he has taught at Colorado College and with the UMass/Amherst MFA Writing Program. Works in progress consist of three novels and a collection of essays.

Editorial Reviews

Swiftian satire from Crawford, whose novel takes the form of an instruction manual written for his family by a neo-Victorian horticulturist. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Crawford's novel, which has the full title Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood, is a wicked parody of the handbooks on being virtuous cranked out by countless Victorian writers. LJ's reviewer found the idea behind the book "a master stroke of comic inventiveness" (LJ 4/15/78).

Library Journal