The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Stool Wives by William F. Van Wert
Greg Garrett

William F. Van Wert. Stool Wives. Plover Press, 1996. 209 pp. $20.00.

It is there and it isn’t there. The Africa that William Van Wert creates in Stool Wives is an Africa of words, an Africa where characters may speak in anagrams or lob puns like grenades or be named after great wordsmiths like Achebe and Ngugi. A level of satire and social realism does exist here—this is not merely a work about language, and one can, with a healthy dollop of imagination, discern a tangible, flesh-and-blood African reality through the language—but the great appeal of this fiction is the humor, irony, and surprisingly powerful emotion released by and through words. Plover Press calls this work a “nivola,” and it certainly is something new under the sun. Stool Wives might be best envisioned as a Things Fall Apart written by a Nabokov, Barthelme, or Coover, a work in which we have the twin pleasures of reading a dramatic narrative about a distant and different place and knowing that we are reading a dramatic narrative about a distant and different place.

The story is at once mythic and mythical. In rural Nigeria a tall young man named Kimbene thirsts for glory, and his best chance of it is in growing tall enough—or at least seeming to grow tall enough—to overshadow the current rural king and assume his position. With the help of his devious Shakespeare-loving friend Ngugi, he becomes rural king and presides over a growing group of “stool wives,” wives whose function is to sit behind the king as he feasts, to bear him children, and to raise them. Through the twists and turns of fate and Van Wert’s narrative, Kimbene is forced to an awareness of a larger existence, to the knowledge that there are realities beyond feasting and sexing his stool wives. He must engage other tribes through warfare or statecraft and must confront directly the outside world in the persons of a Texas oilman, a melancholy Briton, a Finnish soap dealer, a group of Japanese businessmen, and an Italian journalist named Caruso. At length he becomes something both more and less than what he was when he aspired to kingship, and at the end of the story, he literally and figuratively disappears. The work concludes with the thoughts of Kimbene’s wives, who discuss the nature of men and power and love, and we are left to try and make some sense of our reading experience with their help.

This conclusion and the title of the fiction seem appropriate, since, as one of the wives points out, in Africa (and elsewhere, perhaps), men dream and women work: “Men like to be myths. . . . We are left to be the reality.” While Stool Wives twists and turns and sometimes loves words so much that it hinders healthy digestion, it’s a work well worth reading, not so much for what it can tell us about African reality, but for the sheer joy of language and the moments of connection with word-created humanity. [Greg Garrett]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Stool Wives by William F. Van Wert Greg Garrett William F. Van Wert. Stool Wives. Plover Press, 1996. 209 pp. $20.00. It is there and it isn’t there. The Africa that William Van Wert creates in Stool Wives is an Africa of words, an Africa where characters may speak in anagrams or lob puns like grenades or be named after great wordsmiths like Achebe and Ngugi. A level of satire and social realism does exist here—this is not merely a work about language, and one can, with a healthy dollop of imagination, discern a tangible, flesh-and-blood African reality through the language—but the great appeal of this fiction is the humor, irony, and surprisingly powerful emotion released by and through words. Plover Press calls this work a “nivola,” and it certainly is something new under the sun. Stool Wives might be best envisioned as a Things Fall Apart written by a Nabokov, Barthelme, or Coover, a work in which we have the twin pleasures of reading a dramatic narrative about a distant and different place and knowing that we are reading a dramatic narrative about a distant and different place. The story is at once mythic and mythical. In rural Nigeria a tall young man named Kimbene thirsts for glory, and his best chance of it is in growing tall enough—or at least seeming to grow tall enough—to overshadow the current rural king and assume his position. With the help of his devious Shakespeare-loving friend Ngugi, he becomes rural king and presides over a growing group of “stool wives,” wives whose function is to sit behind the king as he feasts, to bear him children, and to raise them. Through the twists and turns of fate and Van Wert’s narrative, Kimbene is forced to an awareness of a larger existence, to the knowledge that there are realities beyond feasting and sexing his stool wives. He must engage other tribes through warfare or statecraft and must confront directly the outside world in the persons of a Texas oilman, a melancholy Briton, a Finnish soap dealer, a group of Japanese businessmen, and an Italian journalist named Caruso. At length he becomes something both more and less than what he was when he aspired to kingship, and at the end of the story, he literally and figuratively disappears. The work concludes with the thoughts of Kimbene’s wives, who discuss the nature of men and power and love, and we are left to try and make some sense of our reading experience with their help. This conclusion and the title of the fiction seem appropriate, since, as one of the wives points out, in Africa (and elsewhere, perhaps), men dream and women work: “Men like to be myths. . . . We are left to be the reality.” While Stool Wives twists and turns and sometimes loves words so much that it hinders healthy digestion, it’s a work well worth reading, not so much for what it can tell us about African reality, but for the sheer joy of language and the moments of connection with word-created humanity. [Greg Garrett]

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