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Some Instructions to My WifeAuthor: Stanley Crawford American Literature Series November 1985 178 pages, 5.5 x 8 Dimensions: Paperback, 0-916583-15-5 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $9.56—20% OFF! 
Retail Hardcover Price: Our Hardcover Price: $16.00—20% OFF! Hardcover Temporarily Out of Stock |
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Book Description
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?
Some Instructions is the madly precise fantasy of a husband and father who has stepped through the marital looking glass just to see, from the other side, the perfectly kept house and the well-functioning marriage and family.
About the Author
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Stanley Crawford was born in 1937 and was educated at the University of Chicago and at the Sorbonne. He is the author of three novels: Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Travel Notes, Gascoyne, and Some Instructions, a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. He is also the author of two memoirs: A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Farm in New Mexico and Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico. He has written numerous articles in various publications such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Double Take and Country Living. Crawford is co-proprietor with his wife, Rose Mary Crawford, of El Bosque Farm in Dixon, New Mexico. |
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Praise
"Stanley Crawford's satire on Victorian marriage manuals cheerfully lampoons male domination fantasies that persist even in such enlightened times as these . . . Crawford negotiates the literary tightrope he has strung up faultlessly, providing a piercing and comical dissection of the modern institution of marriage."—Newsday"Some Instructions might be seen as an extended paraphrase of that wonderful captionless Thurber cartoon of the house as predator; it might be called a searing indictment of the nuclear family in capitalist society; it might be described as a sustained performance of exceptional virtuosity."—Times Literary Supplement
"The title of Some Instructions . . . nicely conjures the Swiftian satire of its contents—the eccentric dictums of an autocratic husband attempting to keep the world's chaos at bay."—Publishers Weekly
"Reminiscent of instructions by Renaissance husbands to their younger wives is this witty manual of household management and deportment . . . no detail of household economy or personal deportment is too small to merit the squire's personal attention."—Booklist
"Some Instructions is hardly a novel at all—more a homiletic work of fiction, a code of family living reminiscent of Johathan Swift's Directions to Servants and Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. Its purported author is a literal-minded man with a taste for minutiae, the kind of character encountered again a decade later in Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine.—New Yorker
"The disease of fatherhood, however retrograde and on the brink of extinction by classification, is, in the hands of Stanley Crawford, a necessary disorder, still painfully insightful and beautiful."—Ben Marcus, Voice Literary Supplement
"Curt, artful and funny in a way that hushes laughter, Some Instructions is one of the most trenchant investigations yet into that favorite subject of American writers—the family."—Weekly Alibi
"[Some Instructions] is funny and sad and, for all its grotesque exaggeration, not far from reality."—The Boston Sunday Globe
"Crawford's mini-sermons are so unmistakable that one cracks smiles if not stifles guffaws at this incredulous Man-ual on the Man-aging Influence which settles for nothing less than its own divine intervention."—Cups
"The charm of Crawford's book lies in the fact that while one scoffs at the 'instructor' and snickers at his semi-Victorian prose, there is an underpinning of contemporary American neurosis that makes it all ring true."—New Pages